Exploring Musical Emotions

Overview

Duration: 45 minutes
Year Level: Year 5
Class Size: 25 students
Learning Area: The Arts – Music
Curriculum Link:
Australian Curriculum – The Arts: Music (Years 5–6)
ACAMUR097: Explain how the elements of music communicate meaning by comparing music from different social, cultural and historical contexts, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music.
ACAMUM090: Explore dynamics and expression, using aural skills to identify and perform rhythm and pitch patterns.

---

Lesson Focus

WALT (We Are Learning To):

• Listen to music and identify how it makes us feel.
• Understand how tempo, pitch, and dynamics contribute to the emotions in music.
• Express musical emotions visually using drawing and colour.

---

Success Criteria

By the end of the lesson, students will be able to: ✅ Identify different emotional moods in music
✅ Explain how musical elements affect the way we feel
✅ Represent musical emotions using colours, lines, and shapes in a drawing
✅ Discuss their personal emotional responses using appropriate musical vocabulary

---

Resources Needed

• Audio system or speakers
• Pre-selected music tracks (see details below)
• Drawing materials (paper, coloured pencils, crayons, textas)
• Whiteboard and markers
• Emotion cards (happy, sad, angry, calm)
• Visual aid: A3 music emotions chart (tempo, pitch, dynamics with visuals)

---

Lesson Structure

1. Warm-Up & Hook (5 mins)

• Activity: Class brainstorm — “How can music make us feel?”
• Teacher writes “Emotions music can create” on the whiteboard. Students call out feelings they’ve experienced while listening to music (e.g. relaxed, excited, scared, joyful).
• Introduce emotion cards and explain that we’ll be listening for these today: Happy, Sad, Angry, and Calm.

🌟 Tip: Do a quick stretch and shake-out to “reset” their energy before diving into the listening tasks.

---

2. Listening and Drawing: Exploring Emotions (25 mins)

Activity: Students listen to 4 short music excerpts (1.5 to 2 minutes each), each representing a different mood. After each one, they create a drawing that shows how the music makes them feel using colours, lines and shapes.

Emotion	Suggested Piece	Key Features (to discuss)
Happy	Vivaldi’s "Spring" from The Four Seasons	Fast tempo, major key, high pitch
Calm	Yiruma’s "River Flows in You"	Gentle dynamics, slow tempo
Sad	Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings	Slow tempo, soft dynamics, minor tonality
Angry	Orff’s "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana	Loud dynamics, intense rhythm

• Students listen with eyes closed and focus on the mood.
• After each track, give 3–4 minutes for sketching their emotional reaction.
• Encourage use of abstract symbols, swirling lines, sharp marks, colour choice—anything that shows the feeling.

---

3. Group Reflection and Musical Elements Discussion (10 mins)

• Pair-share: Students turn to a partner and compare their drawings for one emotion.
• Class gathers and shares interpretations. Teacher guides a discussion on:
  • Tempo (fast = excited/happy; slow = sad/calm)
  • Pitch (high = joyful; low = gloomy)
  • Dynamics (loud = angry/agitated; soft = peaceful)
• Use visual chart on board to anchor vocabulary terms with emotive expressions.

Guiding Questions:

• What parts of the music made you feel that way?
• What did you draw, and why?
• How does the tempo affect the emotion?

---

4. Wrap-Up and Exit Ticket (5 mins)

Activity: Exit Slip
Each student writes on a slip of paper:

• One emotion they felt most strongly today
• One musical element they heard that helped create it

Collect slips on the way out to check for understanding.

---

Differentiation Strategies

For Diverse Learners:

• Use emotion icon cards as visual anchors for students with additional needs or EAL/D students.
• Provide a drawing template with labelled face outlines for students needing extra support (e.g. choose one: sad, happy, angry, calm – and draw in and around it).
• Offer sentence starters during discussion:
  • “I felt ___ because the music was ___.”
  • “The pitch was ___ and that made the music sound ___.”

For Students Requiring Extension:

• Challenge to identify multiple emotions within one track.
• Ask students to create a key for their drawing (e.g. blue lines = calm; red zigzags = angry).
• Extension task: Choose a short poem or emotion-based paragraph and match it to one of the pieces. Justify selection using musical elements.

---

Assessment for Learning

• Formative assessment through:
  • Observation during drawing and discussion
  • Exit slips showing understanding of emotional responses and musical elements
• Assess use of appropriate music vocabulary and depth of reflection.

---

Teacher Reflection (Post-Lesson Prompt)

• Which emotion did students connect with most easily? Why?
• Were students able to articulate how musical elements influenced their feelings?
• What drawing strategies were most effective in expressing emotional responses?

---

Optional Extension/Homework

• Students create their own "Mood Tracklist": a short playlist (real or imagined) of five songs that make them feel different emotions, with notes about tempo, pitch, and dynamics for each.
• Can be shared in the following lesson as a music diary or class display.

---

Extra Notes

🌱 Integrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Perspectives: In a follow-up lesson, explore how traditional Indigenous Australian music uses musical elements to tell stories and represent emotion, connecting land, people, and spirit.

---

Prepared by: AI Assistant for Creative Teaching Australia
Designed to meet: The Australian Curriculum, provide engagement & depth, and offer a creative cross-modal approach to musical understanding.

---

"Music speaks where words fail—today, each child became a composer of feelings.”