Special Features

Printable Version for your convenience!

Music

Opera Lesson

By Krystine Vollan

This lesson will work with any grade above 5th. Basically you need music of many operas from past and present rock operas. I start off by having the students brain storm on what makes an opera. You always get the screachy voices and fat ladies in the group. Then you come up with a complete definition using their responses. Give the students a piece of paper where they can write this down the definition and take a listening test. I give the students a 10 point quiz on which songs are from operas and which are not. I use only opera music so that a correct response would always be yes. After the test we exchanged papers and found that most did not get them right. (in fact almost always everyone gets some wrong.) Then we go back and look at our definition. We then modify it to fit all the example that we given. We come up with the fact that as long as the song has a story line and is music, it is opera. Then the students take another test with this new found knowledge. I always slip in one piece that starts off with talking. If you use some live performance stuff, there should be some talking in it. With this lesson, you are starting to dispell the myth that all operas sound high and screechy.

E-Mail Krystine.