Music & Movement

Ideas to get your pupils grooving

Match movement to 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 tempi 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.

Learn some dance moves

Whether it’s ballroom a la Strictly, or the Macarena a la 90’s school disco 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!

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.

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.