Happy and Sad music

This activity, is a good option to:

• Produce abstract artistic compositions.
• Use colours as symbols for expressing mood. 

DEVELOPMENT OF THE ACTIVITY

1. Listen to some happy music and talk about how it makes us feel, then, listen to some sad music and talk about how it makes us feel. 

Talk about other things that make us feel happy and other things that make us feel sad.

Now, connect these emotions to appropriate colour symbolism.

Then, on the one hand, talk about the colours which would be used to depict happy music: warm colours (red, orange yellow) from the top of the rainbow, the colours "nearest the sun". On the other hand, talk about the colours which would be used to depict sad music: the cold colours from the blue part of the
rainbow (blue, indigo violet). 

Make an explicit connection between feeling warm and feeling happy and another connection between feeling cold and feeling sad: Happy music can make us feel warm and happy; sad music can make us feel cold and sad. 

2.Give each child a piece of paper that has a fold or line down the middle.
Ask the children to paint a sad feeling on one half of the paper, then, ask them to paint a happy feeling  on the other half.

Remind the children that we can use warm colours for happy feelings and cold colours for sad ones, but allow them to combine different colours in their own way.

End the session by asking each child to identify the sad and the happy halves of their picture.