Nessun Dorma- None Shall Sleep!

Playing with the Classics

While at the Music EdVentures conference in February, Peggy Bennett introduced the crowd to her marvelous book, Playing with the Classics. I talked about this book in another post and again, it is a great resource. Really fun lessons for using traditional classical music in the classroom. Peggy also talked about her second volume of the book, due to come out very soon I hope. She led us through one of the new lessons "Nessun Dorma" from the opera Turandot.

As soon as I returned back to my class I used the ideas and lesson that Peggy taught us with one of my first grade classes. So much fun! Every time I see them now though they want to do Nessun Dorma and act out the story. Since we are enjoying this so much, we will be presenting Nessun Dorma at our Young Authors Day at our school. Young Authors Day is kind of like a literary field day. All the activities are focused on books and reading. We also link it to our Spring Artfest and display student art work throughout the building. We invite parents to come and tour our "student museum".

But- Back to Nessun Dorma! As I said, the children love acting out the story. This really shows how much children love a good story. Many of the activities in the book involve a story of some type or story making or acting out the story. If only all teaching were this easy. If you haven't ordered the book yet, do so. You won't regret it and your students will love you for it!

I first introduced the class to the story that would go along with Nessun Dorma. We picked a princess and her prince and the townspeople. The class acted out the story and then I introduced them to the composer. We looked at a picture of the composer, Puccini, and talked about the opera Turandot. There was much discussion about the singer we were about to hear and what we could expect from the voice, that it would not sound like ours. On our first listening, there was certainly some giggling at the "opera voice" but they thought it was a pretty song. They especially liked the story. Then we put the whole thing together; story and music. It was wonderful! I can't wait for them to perform it at Young Authors Day. I will try to record their performance and get it posted so check back in May to see if I was able to.