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Carnival of the Animals Unit

Denise Gagne

The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns is one of the most loved works for elementary students. Selections 6-19 in the Listening Resource Kit 1 and the Listening section at musicplayonline are from this work.

If you want to teach your students about Camille Saint-Saëns, show the composer movie. It’s only 2 minutes long, and gives a brief overview of his life, and an overview of the composition. The same composer movie is included in most of the Carnival of the Animals selections so you can show it whenever you like in your study of Carnival of the Animals.

The first selection, Royal March of the Lions has a Listening Map, Concepts and Composer movie. I showed the Listening Map to the students first, and we made up “lion” movements in seats as we watched. During the Introduction we “stood at attention” and during the Fanfare pretended to play trumpets. After the trumpets, we “crept” with hands like lions. During the roar we showed how the music got louder and quieter (crescendo-decrescendo) by moving our arms far apart and then back together. When the piano kept a steady beat we “stalked” like the lions again. After having listened and watched from our seats, we moved into the open space and moved to the music with locomotor movement.

March of the Lions

The selections in the Listening Resource Kits and the Listening selection online all tie in to key concepts that you teach. The concept movie for March of the Lions has the students use the projected pointing page and point to loud and quiet (or tap the beat) as they listen, so reinforces and teaches dynamics and crescendo-decrescendo.

The Hens and Roosters listening map has children imagine a scenario where the rooster is trying to steal grain from the chicks. After listening and watching, this is fun to dramatize with your class. The concept in this selection is long and short notes.

The Wild Donkey teaches children about melodic countour, high/low and fast/slow. The listening map has the students follow the contour of the melody as it moves high and low.

Tortoises has a listening map movie that we moved to as we watched. One of my very clever grade 1 students told me that tortoises are slow moving on land, but swim fast. I had to google tortoises to find out she was right, so we moved slowly during the A section, and in the B section swam like Tortoises to the microbeat.