This blog post is for all you music teachers out there that have ever had the dreaded email telling you your elementary music activities need to be silent for testing week. End of year high stakes testing always has the school a little more on edge. But that doesn’t mean you and your students can’t still learn and have fun during testing week.
Need Some Fun Music Activities To Do During Testing Week?
Are you one of the many music teachers that has had to put teaching on hold during end of year testing so the building can test in silence? Don’t worry! I am here to share my favorite fun but quiet elementary music activities that you can use during testing season.
Because some music rooms are in a separate wing and don’t need to be SUPER quiet, and other music rooms share a wall with a room that is testing, I have ordered these music activities from super quiet to moderately quiet so you can pick what will work for you and your environment. Let’s all get through this testing season together!
Super Quiet Music Class Activities
Song Writing Project
Need your students to work quietly and independently? This is a great time for a song writing project. Students can create their own rhythmic or melodic songs on paper. Then, when testing week is done, they can use the next music lesson to try playing what they created, edit and make changes to create their final product!
Some of my favorite song writing projects can be found in my Song Writing Worksheet Set. It has song templates from quarters and eights all the way to melodic fragments from familiar recorder songs that can be put together to create a unique song.
Online Activities
Another way to have students work independently and quietly is to give them online activities to work on. Have students bring their headphones and they could work on Chrome Music Lab.
Or listen to a lesson and answer questions in Quaver (if your school has access to the program). Many learning platforms, such as Canvas, also have the ability to import videos from YouTube and add pop-up questions throughout the video.
Your younger kids might enjoy Carnegie Hall’s adventure through Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
Write the Room
After being stuck sitting for hours at a time, I always feel for students during testing week. That’s why I alway prefer to pick something where they can move around. But how to move and still maintain absolute quiet?
My students LOVE doing write the room music activities. I hide posters around the room. It can be on any topic you want. I tend to do mine with rhythms, but I have also done ones with vocabulary, composers and even time signatures.
Students have to find all the hidden posters and copy whatever is written on them onto their papers. Usually I play a song and have students find as many as they can before the song is done. But in this case, I would make this a Secret Agent version of the game. You have to try and find as many as you can, without giving away their location. Students can’t talk to each other.
Often it is very easy for students to figure out where posters are because there will be another kid standing there copying a rhythm. But by making an incentive like that they only get points for rhythms that no one else found (or less than 5 people found), you would incentivise them to be a bit more discreet (and quiet) in their copying.
Worksheets
For some of your younger grades that weren’t testing all day but still have to be quiet, you could make it a musical worksheet day. You could have them match percussion instruments into the right group – metals, woods, shakers, or membranes.
You could do a color by note worksheet that reveals a secret picture. Or a music math worksheet where they have to add and subtract note values.
They could learn about instruments from around the world and paste pictures of them onto a world map. Or you could read a book about a famous composer and they could draw a picture summarizing what they learned.
Slightly Less Quiet Elementary Music Activities
Listening Glyphs + Maps
Unless your music is blaring, you should easily be able to do listening activities in elementary music if you aren’t sharing a really thin wall with the testing room.
Listening maps are a great way to get students to quietly focus and follow along with music. Using a pointing stick (drink stirrers are great for this) or even just their finger, students can follow along with the song using the visual cues. You could even do questions as you listen about certain sections (were they forte or piano, for example).
Another great way to go is listening glyphs. They allow students to color as they listen. Students have to listen for certain elements in the song in order to know what color to color each part of the picture. They are a great way to guide student listening.
Music Board Games
If you have the time to do the set up, musical board games can be very fun too. But you really need to gauge your students and their ability to work quietly in groups.
If you think they can handle it, Staff Candy Land is a great way to go. Composer Heads Up would also be more low key and quiet. Music trivia could work well too.
I would probably shy away from anything like Rhythm Jenga or timed games. Kids tend to get really excited and voice levels rise.
Quiet Activities for Elementary Music
No matter what, we know it is a challenge to stay quiet in music class. But I hope that this post gave you at least one idea you could try to keep learning during testing week. Hang in there!
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