World Animal Day on 4th October is a great opportunity to bring music and the natural world together in your primary classroom. From exploring animal sounds and movement to creating musical representations of different creatures, there are plenty of ways to use the theme to develop children’s musical skills while engaging their imaginations.
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What does an animal sound like?
Start by exploring the sounds that animals make. Ask children to think about the sounds of different animals and how they could recreate those sounds using their voices, bodies or instruments. Encourage children to experiment with pitch, dynamics, tempo and timbre. This is a perfect activity for KS1 to cover the National Curriculum aims of experimenting, creating, selecting and combining sounds using the interrelated dimensions of music.
Create an animal soundscape
Choose a habitat such as a rainforest, jungle, farm, ocean or woodland. Give small groups of children responsibility for creating the sounds of different animals within that environment. They might use percussion instruments, body percussion, voices or classroom objects. Once everyone has developed their sound, combine the different parts into a class soundscape. Try adding a simple structure: Silence → quiet sounds → increasingly busy → loudest point → gradually quieter → silence. This provides an opportunity to explore dynamics and texture while also encouraging children to listen carefully to one another.
Compose an animal piece
Challenge children to create a short piece of music inspired by an animal. Give each group an animal and ask them to move beyond the literal sound it makes to consider other aspects such as how it moves and the emotions it might feel. For younger children, this could be an entirely practical activity using sounds and movement. Older children could record their ideas using graphic notation or conventional notation; but remember that the important thing is that children are making musical decisions, rather than whether they can write their music down accurately.
Animal rhythms
Animal names are a useful starting point for rhythm work. Say the names of different animals and clap the syllables: ti-ger, e-le-phant, shark. Ask children to identify how many sounds or syllables they hear in each name. They can then transfer these rhythms onto untuned percussion instruments. For KS2 this activity could logically follow on into notation work, looking at how to write their rhythms down. For an extra level of challenge, challenge them to create a rhythmic pattern using several animal names and perform it as a class.
Listen to music inspired by animals
There is a wealth of repertoire inspired by animals, including Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals. Choose one movement and ask children to listen for clues about the animal being represented. You don’t need to tell children the animal beforehand. Let them listen, form their own ideas and justify their answers using musical vocabulary. There are more ideas for using this piece as a stimulus in this blog.
Make your own musical zoo
For a larger class project, create a musical zoo. Assign each group an animal and ask them to compose a short piece representing it. Groups can decide on their instruments, sounds, rhythms and movements. You could even link this to Art & DT by making animal masks and costumes to wear. Bring the pieces together to create a whole-class immersive performance where the audience move around the space ‘visiting’ each exhibit. You could challenge the children to think about how the exhibits should be arranged. Which animal should come first? Should there be silence or transitional music as the audience moves between each one? Could two animals appear at the same time? This turns a collection of small compositions into an exercise in musical structure and ensemble performance.
Making the most of World Animal Day
Themed days can be a useful way of engaging children, but the strongest music activities are those where the theme provides a context for meaningful musical learning. The key questions are always: What are the children learning about music through this activity? How does this link to what they have done before? What will they be doing next to progress their learning?
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