Spring Activities: Vivaldi Play-Along and Dr. Musik Robot Sequencer Creative Music Activity for Younger Musicians
Vivaldi’s Spring
In the States, spring has sprung. This means the return of flowers, green grass, birds singing, warmer weather, allergies, and the study of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269, "Spring" (La primavera), Allegro (in E major).
This activity is a rhythm play-along to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, "Spring", Movement 1. It includes quarter notes and rests (crotchet), half notes and rests (minim), whole notes (semibreve), meter, form, and dynamics.
Spring Activity Found on Seesaw
There is also a Seesaw Activity that includes more musical spring activities found here: https://app.seesaw.me/pages/shared_activity?share_token=ujufb6e7TsSMUPJpHZW_0g&prompt_id=prompt.a881ef7b-a88a-4477-89ca-473be5a0299d
This Seesaw activity includes many musical activities that involve spring themes. The younger students can play and make up new words to the song, "Spring is Here". They also can perform the movements with my daughter Sarah to the song, "John the Rabbit". There is also an activity where they listen to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, "Spring", Movement 1, and map out the form with the drawing tool. Finally, the older students could perform the rhythm play-along to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, "Spring", Movement 1.
Kindergartners Creating Music to Form Using Dr. Musik's Robot Sequencer
Click the video above to watch the current episode or read the blog post below.
If you have read my previous books and posts, then you know that I love having my kindergartners find and move to patterns and forms in music. One of my favorite pieces at this time of year is Vivaldi’s Four Seasons “Spring” 1st Movement.
Vivaldi’s Spring has a Rondo form of ABACADAEA. There are so many wonderful movement activities that you can do with young learners using this form. Since the selection has items embedded into it (A=trees, B=birds, C=river, D=thunder, E=sun), you can easily have the students move like those items when their themes are heard. You can also have your students improvise their own movements, or create a space where the students are assigned an item and they move on that space when they hear their theme, or use scarves and a parachute to create movements for each theme.
Forms also lend themselves to math integration. Kindergarten students are learning about patterns. I recall my youngest daughter being challenged by patterns in kindergarten so I started packing brown, yellow, and red M&Ms in her lunch so she would 1) be motivated to finish her lunch and 2) create a pattern with the M&Ms. The teachers allowed me to do that for one week so that she could learn about patterns. It worked! By integrating movement into the form of musical selections, you are also connecting math patterns to music.
Dr. Musik
Dr. Musik is Thierry Simard, an elementary music educator and composer (under the name of Le Renard à la guitar) who lives in Montreal, Canada. Thierry created the website so that his students could get familiar with many music concepts such as composition, note naming, music creation, rhythm recognition, instrument playing, and more. It is a fabulous website with many useful games that could be played in a 1:1 classroom, or as I did with Robot Sequencer, displayed on one device connected to a screen.
Tip: If using the website on a tablet, mobile phone, etc. remember to scroll past the advertisements at the top that look like they are a part of the website.
Robot Sequencer
Robot Sequencer gives the opportunity for students to create music using a C major scale and three percussion sounds, all in the shapes and sounds of robots. The C major scale is also coordinated with boomwhacker or playxylo.com colors.
After the students moved to the form, performed the form with scarves, and then acted out the song, we decided to create a song with the same Rondo form using Robot Sequencer. I started the activity by having the A Section already created in Robot Sequencer. This was intuitive to do. I used the first four beats and created a melody that sounded happy like the “trees” melody in the A Section of Spring. I created it five times, leaving space between each A Section for Sections B, C, D, and E.
I then clicked on the “floppy disk” 💾 icon which led me to a new menu. I clicked the save button and it generated a code for me. I wrote down the code for later.
When the kindergartners entered my room, we reviewed Spring. I then brought up Dr. Musik’s Robot Sequencer. This immediately made their eyes open wide with an “Oooooo” sound. I clicked on the disk icon 💾 and input the code (tip: you must use the keyboard that is on the screen, not your device’s keyboard). The song popped up and the students listened to it. I asked them to describe what they heard. The responses ranged from, “pretty” to “there’s something missing” to “I think they all sound the same.”
Once we determined that we had five themes that were the same, I showed them the listening map again. They realized that those same melodies represented the trees. We then looked at the first blank columns and deduced that they were for the bird theme. We listened to each sound and I assigned a few kindergartners to help me create music in the empty columns. Many of them wanted high notes since birds sing and fly high.
After each section, we listened to it again. The comments from the kindergartners were, “Wow!” “Let’s create the next part!” “I like that a lot!”. We continued and when we got to the thunder one of the classes, wanted all percussion sounds, while the other class wanted all of the sounds to play together. I loved that they were really comprehending how the musical sounds reflected the trees, birds, river, thunder, and sun.
End Results
When one class finished, I saved it again and it produced a new code. This was wonderful because the original song with the missing B, C, D, and E Sections was still intact. Therefore, when the next class came in, I inputted the original code and they created their own version. When finished, I could save their song separately as the Robot Sequencer produced a different code for them.
When I wanted to share it with the students and parents, I used the screen-sharing tool Loom to record it. I also used a video editing program to add the form letters so the parents understood the activity. I used Final Cut Pro, but you could do this in iMovie, WeVideo, etc.