Mood Music, or What Does the Fox Say?

In many productions, music helps to create the show’s environment and convey the characters’ feelings. In short, it sets the mood of each scene! Now, explore the ways in which music affects the mood in your classroom!

Materials Needed: Speakers, instrumental music of varying styles and tempos

1. Tell your students that you’re going to be exploring different emotions.
2. Play different types of instrumental music for your class and ask them how the music makes them feel, scribing the words they say on the board or a large piece of chart paper. Note: As you write each word, ask your students to show that emotion on their face.
3. Using those same words, ask your students to continue to explore the words you’ve written by physicalizing each word (i.e., sad = slumping downward, happy = stretching upward, etc.) through a gesture. Once they’ve done their physical gesture a few times, ask them to add a facial expression, explored earlier, to help convey each emotion.
4. Next, have your students explore the verbal sounds that might accompany the emotions they’ve explored. When they’ve explored all of the emotions through sound, have them add their facial expression and physical gesture. Ask your students questions like:
   • How does the music make you feel?
   • What do you notice about the ways your classmates are moving?
   • How does the music affect the tempo (how fast or slow) at which you’re moving?
5. Now that you and your students have explored each of these emotions as humans, it’s time to become animals!
6. Ask students to think of different woodland creatures such as deer, foxes and raccoons and have them choose one that they’d like to explore individually.
7. Then, repeat Steps 1-4 as their chosen animal! Note: Do this first without music to allow your students to discover their animal physicality and emotions and then add music to see how the music affects the way they feel and move!
8. Finally, call out an emotion and have your students morph from human to the animal they’ve chosen, giving them 10 seconds to do so. Remind them to use their face, body and sound to convey the emotion, both as themselves and their chosen animal. Ask for volunteers to show their human-to-animal movement piece to the rest of the class!

Reflection Questions

• What was it like to explore emotions using facial expressions with and without gestures?
• Which mode of expressing emotions did you like the most? Why?
• How did the music affect how you were feeling and moving?
• How did it feel to explore the physicality, sounds and emotions of an animal?
• What was different about moving as a human versus an animal?