1.

Pull together some selections of music (opera arias, opera overtures, orchestral, or symphonic music) in a language your learner doesn't know. My suggestions can be found in the following playlist, or you can pull from your own favorites. 

I like to have selections that are pretty obviously emotional, with BIG emotions. Musical melancholy is hard for a six-year-old to wrap their heads around, but agony, misery, and defeat—they can hear that! Go big!

2.

Play some music. As your learner listens, they should think about the emotions and the story that they think it tells. One of the ways that music is special is that it can remind us of different emotions just by the way it sounds—it can even help us to feel those emotions. What is even more special is that some types of music were written to tell stories. You don’t always have to understand the words to get the story.

3.

After they listen, have them tell you their story. There are no right or wrong answers…it is their responses and their listening skills that are important here!

I have done this listening activity with kids in kindergarten through young adults and they have always responded. It is fun and creative, and it engages those storytelling processes that are so important to emerging readers. It also helps students to organize their thoughts into a coherent story and sequence events.

VARIATIONS:

Depending on your needs you can do this same activity but ask for different responses from your student.

Do you have a very wiggly little one in need of some physical activity?
Interpretive dance is a great way to have them burn off extra energy, listen for the emotions in a piece of music, and tell a story in physical space. The process is the same as above, except instead of telling you the story they hear, ask them to show you the story that they hear with their bodies and movement. They are not allowed to speak. They dance what they hear.

Need some peace and quiet, and to get a little something done for work?
Pull out as big a sheet of paper as you have, markers or crayons, and tell them that music has a line. You are going to play some selections (create a playlist if you cannot do this activity directly with them) and have them draw one line throughout the music.

The game here is that the line is to describe the music. Is the music smooth and slow? Maybe your line has lazy curves or loops. Is the music fast or jagged? Your line should reflect that. It can loop, scrawl, zigzag—but it cannot come off the paper! 

Have your student respond to the music with a full-blown work of art.
They can write an ekphrastic poem. Usually ekphrastic poems are poems that are inspired by our reactions to visual arts, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be in reaction to a symphonic piece! 

This activity is a lot of fun, and can be used with little ones, or geared up for older kids easily. This activity has a LOT of potential to bring in math skills with a little creativity on your part too. Is your student working on geometric shapes? Ask them to include such shapes in their set design. Working on fractions or ratios? Have them pay attention to scale in the set design. Students will be working various parts of their brain on this one and the sky is the limit.

You can make this as involved or complex as you would like. You can simply do drawings or you can create a scaled model or a diorama. What do you have on hand?

Setup. 

A set for an opera is the “setting” or environment in which the characters work. 

• Talk a little bit about what they can learn about the story from looking at the background of a page in a picture book. For instance, where do the characters live? How do they live? How do you know? What is the neighborhood or environment like?
  
  
• Talk a little bit about how sets and costumes in the opera or a play tell the audience about the character: Color is super cultural, but can convey a lot of emotional information, for instance.
  
  
• Explain that they are going to have a chance to create a set for the story of an opera. Each scene might have a different set as characters move through their story and the environments in it. You can choose to concentrate on one scene or have them design multiple scenes. If your student is older, have them try to figure out how to create one set and create multiple scenes or environments by adding or subtracting elements from their set. For this exercise, they can design the furniture, wall hangings, etc., of all interiors as well.

Activity. 

1.

Choose an opera! Wonderful operas for kids to explore might be The Magic Flute by Mozart, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Rossini’s La Cenerentola (Cinderella), or Massenet’s Cendrillon (also Cinderella). 

2.

Find and read the synopsis of the opera together. Synopses of all of these operas are readily available online and so are English language librettos. If your student is in high school, have them read the libretto. Then listen to some of the music.

3.

From the synopsis, have your student identify one or two scenes they would like to design the set for.

• What does the set need? 
• What colors should they use, etc.?
• What elements are most important?

4.

Sketch out the background. Have them think about where in the space a singer actor could be. Remind them that this will be three dimensional.

5.

Create your diorama! Lots of set designers create 3D models and include cut outs to represent the characters. Don’t forget to scale up!

If your student can work with ratios, decide how much smaller their model is than what they want the set to be in real life. If your kid is working on geometry and studying shapes, work a cube or dodecahedron into the set! Why might it be there?  What is it for?

This activity relies more on your child’s right brain.

1.

Download and print out the gingerbread house and characters from Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel from the links below.

2.

Have the little ones color in the finger puppets and cut them out, and glue popsicle sticks to them.​

3.

Reenact the story. The gingerbread house provides the set for some 3-D fun!

Let their imaginations run wild or follow the opera’s storyline here.

Download the Gingerbread House here. 

Download the Finger Puppets here.

What is a pastiche?

During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the demand for new operas was STAGGERING. Composers tried to create as many fresh options as they could. As you can imagine, it isn’t that easy to write a brand new opera on demand, so composers sometimes created what we call pasticcio or pastiches.

They would bring together selections from other operas, tweak them to fit new words and new situations, and create a new story. The composer would then create the recitative (connecting conversations) to string it all together. Voila! A new opera!

Create your own!

1. 

Find a story. You can use a familiar one or make up one of your own. If you would like a scaffold for younger students pick a very familiar story, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

2.

Identify the major events in the story. This is called sequencing. Learners should pick up on the major emotions in the story too.

3.

Have them think of popular songs that they know, or songs that they like that might fit for these events.

4.

Here’s the really fun part: Re-write the words to fit the situation so that you can sing your “new” song.  New words, old tune!

Currently, you can find me singing, “Wash, Wash, Wash your hands. Just wash away the virus. Wash, Wash, Wash your hands, that way, it will get by us. Wash, Wash, Wash, Wash. You must wash your hands.” to the tune of Verdi’s Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore. (Now it’s stuck in your head too. Ha!)

5.

Now string your songs together with dialogue!

A couple of things to remember as you're writing your pastiche:

• In general, in opera, an aria or an ensemble provides emotional context to the action and recitative is the dialogue that holds it together…Recitative tells you what I’m doing; arias tell you how I feel about it.
  
  
• Arias (a song for one voice) and duets (a song for two voices), etc., are usually sung at emotional high points in the story. In our example below of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Goldilocks might sing some recitative about how she is taking a walk because it is a beautiful day, and then sing an aria about how delicious the sunshine feels on her shoulders and how happy she feels hearing the birds sing.

6.

Once you have it, give it a whirl! Perform it together. Have fun!

In theater, clothing (costumes) give the audience REAMS of information about a character, and good costume design works both on a conscious and subconscious level to provide insight into who and what a character is.

In this activity, your student gets to design a costume! It can be a costume for an opera, a story, a play, or someone they make up themselves. The trick is, they have to think about how the costume they design transmits information about the character of the person wearing the costume.

1.

Take some picture books out or go online to look for pictures of people in plays or operas.

2. 

Start asking questions and start easy:

Are the clothes fancy or casual? What do you think they are made out of? Do the clothes look expensive or are they cheap? Are they in good repair, or are they worn? What kinds of colors are they? Do they look coordinated, or are they eccentric? What are the clothes for? Are they a uniform? Do they look like work clothes or party clothes? You get the picture.

3.

Think about what  the clothing tells us about the personality wearing them.

For instance: Where do you think the person is going or what are they doing based on their clothes? Do you think the character bought their own clothes, or did someone buy them for them? Do you think they have a lot of money or very little? Etc.

In a play, costumes need to do some practical things as well as aesthetic things. They may need to serve a purpose—they need to tell us what time period the show is set in; maybe if a person “belongs” with another person; costumes can tell us where the person is going, where they are, and what they are doing.  Costumes have to be practical, in that they can have different parts that can be put on or taken off to indicate that a scene has changed (think a hat or a cloak).

4.

Choose an opera. Here are some opera synopses that you can read to your child, or have your child read:

The Magic Flute

The Barber of Seville

La Bohème 

5.

Have you kid/s pick a character or characters from their chosen opera.

6.

Design costumes for that character, paying close attention to what we know of the character from the synopsis.

• Listen to some of the music their character/s sing/s. Music is available on Spotify, Amazon Music, or any other streaming service. Don’t watch YouTube! It might change your costume design. Although research is a key component of costume design for this exercise, let them create the costume based on their understanding/reading of the character. Both reading the words the character sings and hearing the music that they sing will inform their thoughts about the character.
• If you want to go deeper with an older child, have them read a libretto in translation. All of the above operas have librettos available online in English with a quick google search.

Download a costume template here.

I have usually done this activity with class groups of 5 or more, but you can extend your cast with toys from your kids collection…instead of using your bodies in the vignette, you could use your stuffed animals, dolls or action figures. But I admit, it is more fun to do it with your bodies!

In this exercise, you are also tapping into that literacy skill of sequencing. 

1.

To start, look at a picture book.

• Discuss with your kids how the pictures tell the story.
• Ask them how they know what is going on in the story without words telling them.
• Explain that movies, plays, operas and ballets tell stories in similar ways—with visuals. Often it is possible to follow an opera without understanding the words at all.

2.

Next, explain that now you are going to tell/read them a story (or have them read it themselves) with no pictures. Their job will be to pick 5 major things that happened in the story that they could use to tell the basic story. Read the story together.

3.

Have them identify the events in the story.

4.

Create a silent vignette of each scene. They should make sure that their faces are in the appropriate expressions, etc. They can also use dolls and stuffed animals to act out the scenes.

5.

Have them perform the vignettes for you. They are not allowed to speak. See if you can guess what the scene is, or what is happening in each scene!

EXTENSION ACTIVITY:

• Your kids can take this further and create a stop motion animated movie with dolls and action figures set to your favorite opera overture! Just create your vignette, snap a pic on your phone, reposition your figures, take another pic…etc., etc. For the right kids this could take HOURS and you can work, clean the house, nap…