Learning About Peter and the Wolf

Today in preschool we learned all about Peter and the Wolf. First we read a story about being a good friend, then we went on to talk about the friendship Peter, the cat, bird, and duck had. Then we looked at the different kinds of musical instruments used in the story and even got to hear the clarinet played in person.

We watched a little video with a cute cartoon version of the story and the kids loved listening for the different instruments throughout. Most of the kids were enraptured and wanted to keep watching, but one of the children was getting very scared at the cat chasing the bird so I decided to end it early before they could be traumatized by the wolf gobbling up the duck. :)

After we turned off the video, we just listened to parts of the story and narration, conveniently skipping over the scarier parts. I figured the point of the lesson was to learn to listen for the different instruments not for an accurate analysis of fine literature/music, so I let them interpret the story any way they liked. In our version the duck was not eaten (I completely skipped this part), the wolf shrunk in size and turned nice before calmly being taken to the zoo, and the cat repented for his mistake of chasing the bird and transformed into a nice cat.

Then we did a coloring activity with the different characters from the story and the kids matched up each character’s corresponding instrument and glued it next to them. They all seemed to have a good time and if you were interested in following through with this, you could have them listen to different types of music and try to figure out what kind of instrument is playing. Peter and the Wolf is available for purchase on itunes and the cute cartoon video we watched is linked here if you wanted to watch the rest (they watched part 1, but not part 2).

We missed Gavin today. Hope he feels better very soon!