31 Days of Rhythm: Prepare Quarter Notes and Eighth Notes using In the Hall of the Mountain King

This has to be one of my favorite pieces of music to use in my teaching. I love to use classical pieces that my students immediately recognize. They are so much more engaged when they've heard the piece in their lives already.

In this piece, there are just so many great musical concepts just waiting to be unpacked: tempo, dynamics, orchestral instruments, storytelling, pitch, and of course, rhythm. The clear rhythmic motive in this piece is so catchy and accessible for even my youngest students.

For our MIOSM blog series, I am sharing how I use this piece to prepare my young students for quarter note and barred eighth notes. Here are a few different tried-and-true ways to use it:

1. One of my favorite ways to introduce the piece is to play a recording of it while dramatically telling them the story of Peer Gynt’s attempt to flee from the trolls. I think that storytelling is one of the most overlooked aspects of our craft. It is arguably the oldest form of human expression, and I love being able to get my students' attention and help them hone their aural skills by telling them stories.

(If your school and administration is super open-minded, perhaps you could also play them this terrifying video? Just kidding. Don’t show this video unless you want angry parents calling you demanding to know why you showed their child this demonic video in music class.)  

Anyway, while I tell them the story, I begin chanting “tiptoe, tiptoe, tiptoe, troll” to the rhythm while our hero tries to escape. When the tempo and dynamics increase, I change it to “run run, run run, run run, troll!” It doesn’t take long before all of my students are chanting it along with me. Most are also singing along to the melody.

2. In a previous blog post, Listening Lessons Three Ways, I shared an awesome tool that was given to me by a former teacher: she calls it her "Marauders Map". It is actually two long paper rolls (they are a few feet wide and look great up on a chalkboard or dry erase board.) I start with the iconic notation and then when I'm ready to actually present quarter and eighth notes, I'll put the other one up side-by-side to compare.

3. In case you don't want to make your own map, here is a free printable/projectable one that I created using iconic notation:

4. Another fun activity to do with “Mountain King” is compare it to Mary Had A Little Lamb. I challenge my students to see if they can sing the lyrics to “Mary Had A Little Lamb" to the melody of "Mountain King." The same can also be done using "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" and it's fun to try and do the movements faster and faster with the accelerando in the piece.

5. One of the things that makes "In the Hall of the Mountain King" so accessible for students is the fact that it is so pervasive in popular culture. It's been covered and re-recorded by a number of popular artists and it is frequently heard in TV and movies. I've been told it is sampled in the song "Hair Up" from the new Trolls movie (how appropriate given the subject matter.)

No matter the source, there is a good chance that your students will recognize the tune when they hear it in class, and that is a great way to get them engaged in the lesson! 

Listening Lessons Three Ways

One of my goals for this school year is to incorporate more classical music into my lessons. I have many students that, for one reason or another, simply don't know how to respond when they hear certain genres of music.

Last year, I was at a new school and I wanted to play a recording of Renee Fleming before the superbowl so that the students would recognize her singing the national anthem. When they heard the vibrato in her voice, many of them burst out laughing. It was something that they had simply never been exposed to before.

I am making it my mission to change that.

I'm not setting out to impose my personal tastes in music on my students, but I feel that as their music teacher, it is my duty to introduce them to as many different styles and sounds as I possibly can. I know that for many of my kids, general music could be one of the last meaningful interactions that they have with classical music. I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that they leave elementary school having heard enough of it to understand and respond to it in meaningful ways.

Now that I've pontificated a bit on my personal philosophy, here are three ways that I used listening lessons with classical music this week: 

Kinder
To get us in a spooky mood, we used scarves while listening to Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens. The scarves are such a great tool for visual and kinesthetic learners; we do so much with them!

• We can roll it into a ball to show a soft dynamic
• We can open it up wide to show a loud dynamic
• We can bounce it to the beat to show staccato articulations
• We can sway it side to side to show legato articulations
• We can move it high and low to match the melodic contour
• We can stand up, sit down, or toss and catch our scarf to show different sections of the form

Danse Macabre is such a great lesson in CONTRAST, which I love because our youngest children learn what something IS by comparing to what it IS NOT.

2nd Grade
A dear friend of mine from college recently left her teaching job to go back to grad school, and she left me many wonderful learning props. Among them were these strips to go along with In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg.

After telling my second graders the story of the hero and his harrowing escape from the trolls in the mountain, we reenacted the story and sang the main theme saying "run run" for ti-ti and "troll" for ta. After singing it that way for a while, I let the class in on a fun secret: the rhythm to this song is exactly the same as Mary Had a Little Lamb... so we sang the theme again and filled in the nursery rhyme lyrics. What fun!

We also followed a great interactive listening map for this piece that came with my Spotlight On Music 2nd grade curriculum.

5th Grade
For fifth grade, I wanted to give my students the opportunity to really sit and listen to Danse Macabre. I created this listening guide (currently a freebie on my TPT store) and asked them to fill in as many boxes as they could while the piece was playing. We reviewed the difference between open- and closed- ended questions and the difference between writing our facts and writing our opinions. I got some great responses!


I hope my different types of listening lessons have resonated with my students this week. I figure if I got them humming the tune on their way out the door, I've done something right.