Music & Movement for Mental Health Awareness Week

The theme for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week is ‘Movement: Moving more for our mental health.’ Sometimes, amongst all the talk of learning to read staff notation and appreciate ‘the great composers’ we forget that music and movement are natural companions. Here are some ideas for incorporating music and movement into your lessons this week.

Match your movement to the music.

Music is full of ups and downs, fasts and slows, louds and quiets, longs and shorts, all of which make great stimuli for musical movement activities. Responding to changing tempos through movement has an obvious benefit for the development of pulse internalisation, and matching short and long movements to the music can help us to get to grips with rhythm, but we can go beyond this to bring in the other movement that we find within music. Try making bigger or smaller movements to match dynamics, and movements on different levels to match pitch changes. You can even try showing texture changes through involving others in your movements. If you’re feeling ambitious you could put together a whole class physical depiction of the structure of a piece of music.

Try Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King to explore tempo and dynamics, the opening of Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 to explore pitch and rhythm, or The Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA to explore texture and structure.

Dance the story of the music.

Movement allows us to tap into our innate creativity in ways that we might find hard to articulate verbally. For a lot of children, having to convey the story of the music through movement makes them concentrate more than just sitting in silence thinking of something to say about the music when it ends. The key thing to remember is that there is no ‘right’ answer; as long as your pupils can justify their movement in musical terms, it doesn’t matter if one of them thought the piece was about a dog jumping into a pond and another thought it was about someone putting washing out to dry! Simply ask them to move around the space and ‘act out’ the story of the music while you sit back and watch their creativity come to life.

Try any music which is very expressive, but without lyrics, so that your pupils are really concentrating on interpreting the music rather than the words. Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade or Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals are classic examples, but there are also some great contemporary pieces out there to explore such as Eleanor Alberga’s Nightscape.

Learn some dance moves

Whether it’s ballroom a la Strictly, or the Macarena a la 90’s school disco circa there is fun and a sense of satisfaction to be had in moving your body alongside others. To get all pupils fully on board with this you’ll want to pick something that they consider to be not horribly embarrassing. Weirdly, I have heard good things about the Charleston in this context; perhaps because it is meant to be wacky and silly so pupils can have fun with it and pretend any bad dance moves are ironic?!

Make music out of movement

Movement of course is not just an accompaniment to music, it can be the music itself. You can explore all the different percussive sounds your bodies can make, and put these together to make your own piece of music. This music could be descriptive or tell a story, or it could simply be a pure combination of sounds that you think work well together. You can even extend this out to incorporate found sounds in your environment like clinking coffee cups or dripping taps!

Try Anna Meredith’s Connect It if you’re looking for a body percussion piece to learn, or check out the Beat Goes On Body Beats series on YouTube for examples of different sounds and rhythms to add to your own composition.

Further information and support:

Click here for more information on Mental Health Awareness Week 2024

Click here to read more blogs about teaching music

Click here to join our mailing list