Teacher Tuesday: holiday music lesson ideas

December is always a crazy time of year for music teachers (if you want to read my top tips for making the holiday season less stressful, go to this post). The students get more and more hyper, your schedule is unpredictable, and it's hard to keep up with effective lesson planning when you are trying to prepare for concerts, sing-alongs, and musicals. These are a few activities that I found to be very successful with my students last holiday season- they involve movement, relate to the holidays (which is what everyone is thinking about anyway), teach and reinforce musical concepts and skills, and are just plain fun!

This one is a cup routine to go with "Sleigh Ride" that is great for K-2. I use it to teach form, reinforce steady beat, and discuss some of the instruments that they hear as well. You can make the routine more or less complicated for whatever age you want to use it with, but cup routines are fun for all ages no matter how you do it!

If you want more ideas to go with Sleigh Ride, here's a whole post full of them:

The second video is a set of movement ideas to go with the Sugar Plum Fairy, March, and Trepak (Russian) pieces from The Nutcracker. This is another activity that is easily adaptable to a variety of age groups- for older students, I would do one as an example and then have the students come up with their own movements for another piece to show whatever musical element I want them to practice. These movement activities are another great way to reinforce same and different sections to discuss form:

Looking for more lesson ideas to go with The Nutcracker? This post has a TON of ideas:

What are your favorite music lessons for this time of year? Share your ideas in the comments!