Music--Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev

The first grade core knowledge music sequence calls for introduction to instrument families, the presentation of the leader of an orchestra as conductor, and exposure to Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev.

I introduced Prokofiev first along with the concept of him as conductor. I highlighted information about him from this site and we saw pictures and listened to a bit of this piece.


The Peter and the Wolf movie is available online. I felt the second half was too traumatic for my sensitive kids to watch but we did watch the first one because I really like how it demonstrates the instrument for each character with a visual as well as auditory component. Warning: The wolf shows his teeth in a sort of scary way mid video when he’s introduced. We watched only the first video and then listened to the entire recording here--it's the first selection. I used it to initially introduce the instrument families. The wolf does eat the duck and sensitive kids might be bothered.

This is another link with instrument families introduced for this piece that I used later in the lesson.
An alternative is to just listen to the march and avoid the whole story depending on the child. I still think you'd want to introduce the animal sounds though with one of the two choices above. This is the Peter and the Wolf March.

We acted out the movement of the animals as suggested in this link and I also had a similar discussion following the story as the one described in the link.

I felt it was worth talking about wolves now or at some point given the scary presentation in so many stories. I will cover that in a literature unit later but today we did read The First Dog by Jan Brett because I have it here, it's a different viewpoint and it helped me make the point that both are fictional presentations of wolves.

Here is a unit study on wolves. They suggest creating the creatures using tanagrams. You can find tanagram patterns to make with cardstock free online if you don’t have tanagram pieces and want to try something like this. We’ve just got a single set of tanagrams and, at least with the limited amount we have, I would find this hard. So we used pattern blocks instead.

In case a person wanted to do a study on wolves I wanted to include a "learn to howl like a wolf" activity page I have linked that I will use when I cover wolves a little more in depth later. Note that there will be a loud wolf howl when this page is opened.
There are wolf crafts online if a person wanted to extend this lesson.

We did cover the various families of instruments again using this site. This is a more general one that could be used.