Monday Music Activity - The Robin

It’s spring! That means the birds are singing.  I feel like I have heard more birds as of late, whether the birds are bolder because less people are out, or there is less man-made noise going on so we can actually hear the sweet avian calls.  Either way, now is a great time to do a quick unit study on birds.  Do one activity a day for a week, or have one fun day dedicated to learning about birds.  In this article I describe and demonstrate multiple activities across a wide range of subjects, all starting with a simple song about a bird called The Robin. 

Grab a snack or maybe paper and crayons to color with and join me and my girls as we listen and explore the song The Robin. 

 For this activity I used the following materials – paper and coloring items, pictures of birds, specifically Robins, a mode to play music (CD, Youtube, etc.), and the book Listen to the Birds, An Introduction to Classical Music by Ana Gerhard and Cecilia Varela . 

There are 20 vignettes in this book – 20 birds, each with their own story and related piece of classical music.  The book also contains a listening guide for each musical excerpt and a brief biographical paragraph on each composer. 

To begin, I read an excerpt from The Robin, explaining a little bit about the bird and the musical excerpt, Small Sketches of Birds by Olivier Messiaen.  We then listened to the song while drawing pictures of birds.  Have pictures of birds available for your children to copy.  This way they can practice drawing what they can see not what they think a bird looks like.  An alternate drawing activity, use Mo Willems Lunch Doodles where he demonstrates how to draw his famous pigeon. 

After drawing, we moved on to dancing, trying to imitate the movements of birds, matching the sounds the song created.  We did it twice, once without and once with scarves.  

Here is my video - Watch and Enjoy!

Here is a list of other activities for your unit study

Arts & Crafts

• Make your own bird: legos, toothpicks and marshmallows, playdough

• Make a bird mask

Music

• Compose own song – Pick a bird, an activity the bird is doing or an emotion the bird is feeling and create a song to demonstrate that image

• Call the Birds

  • Materials: drinking straw & scissors

  • Squeeze one end of a drinking straw flat. Cut the flattened end into a point. Put the pointed end in your mouth and blow hard.

 Science

• Bird scavenger hunt – Take pictures or draw birds you find in your own backyard or on a walk around the neighborhood

• Feed the Birds

  • Make bird food

  • Make bird feeder out of an empty milk carton, string, scissors and birdseed

• Bird beak: use different “beaks” (kitchen tongs, tweezers, clothespins, toothpicks) to try to pick up objects in the backyard. Make a list of the things you were able to pick up with each beak.

For a free version of Messiaen’s excerpt The Robin from Small Sketches of Birds, here is Hakon Austbo on YouTube.