Spooky Season Listening Picks for Elementary Music

Teaching music to elementary music students can be a challenging task, especially when it comes to finding a way that they can enjoy it. By choosing listening exemplars thoughtfully and finding lesson extensions to go with the listening activities, it is easier to engage my students. 

October is usually when we do our first formal listening unit. It seems that this music is easy for them to connect with, likely because it all sounds spooky. Additionally, some great composers wrote music that is perfect for spooky season, allowing us to conduct composer studies on them as well. 

To simplify my listening curriculum, I have all of my students listen to the same song and complete different activities to go along with the song, depending on their grade. So each year in October I will generally do one of these songs as a formal listening activity, we might listen to others and do stick figures or movement cards, but we only dig into one of the songs. 
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Here are some of my go-to examples for October listening. If you're looking for more listening examples and activities to use throughout the year, be sure to check out the Year of Listening bundle in my TPT store!​

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