Book: Wild Symphony
Blog written by Casey Kunzer, MT-BC
As a music therapist, books are one of my favorite resources! A plot to plan activities around, pre-made song lyrics, and fun illustrations can provide so much of the up-front work of making a fun and interesting intervention. This book, Wild Symphony, written by Dan Brown and illustrated by Susan Batori, is my favorite book to use! Paired with an app that provides a soundtrack, this book takes you through a variety of animals playing orchestral instruments, coming together at the end of the story to create a full symphony. This book is full of fun pictures and hidden surprises, which makes students ask for it year after year, and its versatility is what keeps me saying “yes” to bringing it back! Below, I’ll break down the many different ways I use this book with students of all ages and interests.
Making Requests
For students who aren’t yet reading, this book is still perfect for practicing making requests. Since each page corresponds with an animal, students can ask for the song of a specific animal. They can also use the app themselves to find the animal they want, which is very motivating! For some students, we talk about how the music “sounds like” each animal. For instance, a very bouncy drum part with the kangaroo song! For other students, we pretend we are the animals, matching our movements to the music! All of the musical pieces are about 1-3 minutes long, which is a great amount of time to play and be silly without getting bored of each animal!
Listening Exercise
For students who are ready for a more “academic” style activity, I enjoy using this book as a listening exercise. Provided with a visual aide, students can choose if they think the song is fast or slow, loud or quiet, etc. It’s also a great lesson in objectivity vs subjectivity, and how one piece of music can sound different to different people.
Learning About Instruments
Another way I enjoy using this book is as a platform to introduce students to orchestral instruments. I find that some of the students I work with haven’t had many opportunities to learn about instruments that are used in band and orchestra, despite being very curious about them. Pairing instruments with animals, a topic many children are interested in, really helps them connect with the various instruments and their sounds. They also get a great look at how different instruments can be used to tell a story with sound, like how brass instruments can be used to sound big and heavy, while woodwind instruments might sound more whimsical. Recently, I put together a guessing game with instrument sounds, which I could see as a good follow-up after using this book to teach them!
Hidden Letters
My favorite part of this book, and the reason why many of my students ask for this book, is that it is full of hidden letters! On each page, there are several hidden letters spelling out the name of an instrument. My students love to search for the letters, and many of them challenge themselves to race to find them all before the soundtrack ends. For some students, I will place the letters in the correct order as they find them. For those who are strong readers, I challenge them to unscramble the letters they’ve found using the list of instruments in the front/back of the book to help them. At the very end of the book, the animals all come together, playing the instruments the students helped find, creating their “wild symphony”!
One Last Surprise
There is one last surprise in this book that a student and I recently discovered accidentally! On the credits page of the app, if you press the dragon tail, you will get access to a medieval-sounding extra soundtrack that does not have a corresponding page in the book. The students have loved seeing the “double surprise” this book has to offer!
This book, with all its mystery and versatility, is an activity that I look forward to doing every year! I find it usually takes me 2-3 sessions to get through, and students are consistently excited to work through it in whatever way works for them. I’ve even had students work through it in different ways a few years in a row! It even pairs well with other song stories, such as Never Play Music Next to the Zoo, written by John Lithgow and illustrated by Leesa Hernandez, or A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, adapted by Jessica Law and illustrated by Jill McDonald, for a whole month of animal-themed interventions. No matter how you use it, Wild Symphony is a great resource for music therapists!