Are you looking for ways to incorporate the Olympics for elementary music? Are you looking for activities or games that the kids will love, that will hit your standards, and still connect to real-world events?
I’ve got you covered! Connecting music to current events and cross-curricular subjects is one of my favorite things, so I’ve got lots of ideas for you!
Is there anyone who doesn’t enjoy watching the Olympic Games? I watch in awe of the athletes who are capable of things that the vast majority of the world isn’t. The dedication and commitment these athletes have is inspiring, and I love watching their hard work pay off! Then, you add in hundreds of countries coming together, put differences aside, and compete for the gold medals…I just love it!
Incorporating current events in your classroom is important. We’re going to discuss a few ways you can incorporate the Olympic Games into your elementary music room.
Drumming to “Bugler’s Dream”
The first way to incorporate the Olympics for elementary music is to listen to “Bugler’s Dream.” This song was composed by French composer Leo Arnaud. While students are listening, I’m going to ask them to take note of what instruments they hear. Two big ones they should mention are trumpets and drums. And when they say drum, that would be a great time to remind them a timpani is! Listen again to the beginning of the piece and pay close attention to the timpani before the trumpets come in. See if they can pat the rhythm of the first measure out on their legs while they listen.
Once they have internalized the timpani line, let’s play it on drums! You can use whatever resources you have- rhythm sticks would work just fine. After we have echoed the pattern a few times, I have my students partner up and get one drum per pair. This helps limit the noise some. You could have partner A play drums and partner B play rhythm sticks or pat. When you’ve played it together a few times, demonstrate playing it with the music, then let the kids play with the music!
We’ve played that 4-beat pattern several times at this point, so let’s read it. If you want to introduce your students to a dotted eighth/sixteenth note, now is a great time to do that. If you want to make it a little simpler for students, you could write it as two eighth notes instead.
Now, what if we performed this for families or the school? What a cool way to present students’ learning to the school community! When I did this, I was able to obtain a class set of exercise balls to drum on. Exercise balls are really popular flexible seating options right now, so we had a teacher who graciously let us use them during class. We put the exercise balls on a 5-gallon bucket and used drumsticks to play! Just like you did before, you could absolutely have students partner up and divide it so only half of the class is playing on the exercise balls at once. At the time, we were able to perform this live for the school, but you could easily record it on FlipGrid and send it to families to view!
This is a long song for the focus to be on the drums. The special area teachers were actually doing a school-wide Olympics Games when we performed this, so we had kids bringing in a “torch,” and I edited the video so it was much shorter. While half the class was drumming the timpani line, I had other students who were playing the melody line with unpitched percussion. If I had given myself more time, I would have loved to have half the class play the melody on xylophones!
Learning About National Anthems
Talking about the Olympics in elementary music is the perfect time to introduce new cultures by listening to the national anthems of different countries! I used this playlist by NAXOS on Spotify.
While you’re listening, there are a few options of what students could be doing. We colored flags of some of the countries, which we hung up on bulletin boards around the school. We also discussed similarities and differences between national anthems. The students noticed that many national anthems sounded loud, boisterous, and like a march. That gave us the opportunity to discuss why they thought that so many countries made their anthems sound like that, and how that reflected how the country wanted to be viewed by the rest of the world. It was a really good opportunity to explain our opinions and preferences using musical terminology.
This is also a great time to introduce the culture, holidays, languages, or instruments of these different countries! You could even turn this listening lesson into several lessons where you travel the world, listen to the national anthem, learn about the culture, and then learn about famous composers or artists from that country and listen to their music.
Music Olympic Game: Speed Skating
If you’re looking to play Olympic games in elementary music, one of my favorites to play is speed skating! To prepare this game, you’ll need to get some paper plates, and for game day you’ll also want enough paper/pencils or a white board/marker for each team. You’ll also need several notecards, each with a rhythm on it. The more cards you make, the longer the game goes on, so I made quite a few. Most of the cards I made were rhythms worth ½ or 1 beat. I did sprinkle in some half notes and rests in there. I only put one or two whole notes in there- those are like the golden tickets!
When you’re ready to play, make a track for your students. For my situation, it was a lap around my room. I put the cards face down on a desk in the middle of the track. Each team got two paper plates to use as skates and one student would race around the track, pick up the top card from the desk, and come back to their team. They would give their skates to the next person, who would go get the next card. If they lose their skate, they must go back and get it.
After all of the cards have been taken, the game is over. At this point, the teams add up the number of beats they have and it’s a great cross-curricular activity to review math skills (including fractions if you decide to put rhythms worth less than one beat on cards!). This is a good review for how many beats certain rhythms have! The team with the most beats gets the gold! My kids LOVE this one!
If you’re looking for more Olympic games for elementary music, the book “Olympic Games for the Music Classroom” has some great ideas!
I hope that you got some ideas for using the Olympics in elementary music. I think it’s really important to tie current events to our music curriculum. It is a great way to connect to students and build relationships, and it’s something fun and different! I mean, the Olympics only happens every couple of years, so we might as well take advantage of it! Find me on Instagram (@caffeinated.j) and let me know which of these activities you plan on doing in your classroom!
Looking for other ways to incorporate cross-curricular subjects in music? Check out this post for more ideas!
