John Williams Composer Study

I am so excited about studying John Williams!  He is my very favorite composer for movie scores.  I was a music composition major and for a while toyed with the idea of being a movie score composer.  Dude already loves his work because of Star Wars.  He walks around singing pieces from the Star Wars score all the time.  WE LOVE JOHN WILLIAMS!!!  (Can you tell I'm a little excited?!)  ;-)  John Williams is the first composer that we will be studying this year because the kids already love his music and I know it will be a good intro into composer studies in general for them.

If you aren't familiar with John Williams' work (and you totally should be!), he wrote the score for the following movies:  Hook, E.T., Indiana Jones, Home Alone (first 2 movies), Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws and of course ... Star Wars!  He also wrote the Olympic Fanfare and Theme.  (Personal Pavlovian moment:  everytime I hear the Olympic Fanfare, a mental image of Bob Costas pops in my head!  Weird, right?!)  John Williams is probably the most recognized composer of our time.  Check out Wikipedia for more information about his life and work.

I have explained how we will be doing our composer studies and uploaded a lot of FREE printables on the Johann Sebastian Bach composer study post.  We will be using the Composer Timeline and the Composer Pictures for this study.  Here is also a John Williams Composer notebook page to print that you will use each week for this study.  My little Princess (age 5) will do a coloring sheet while she listens and I will write her responses into the notebook page.  Dude (age 9) will do the coloring sheets if he wants to.  (Sometimes, he is "too old" for coloring!)  I tried to find YouTube videos that were of an orchestra playing each piece.  As the kids are able to see the instruments, they can begin to associate the sound with each instrument.

Week 1

• Listen to the Theme from Star Wars
• Write what you hear (instruments, dynamics, similarities to other pieces by John Williams) and what you feel while listening on the Composer Study page.
• Lego Star Wars coloring page

Week 2

• Listen to the Theme from Indiana Jones
• Write what you hear and feel on the Composer Study page.
• Coloring sheets - there are a variety here.  We are going to use the comic strip one!

Week 3

• Listen to the Olympic Fanfare and Theme
• Write what you hear and feel on the Composer Study page.
• Balance beam coloring sheet or medal ceremony coloring page

Week 4

• Listen to the Theme from Superman
• Write what you hear and feel on the Composer Study page.
• Lego Superman coloring page 

Week 5

• Listen to the Theme from Jaws (John Williams has the audience guess the piece. Very fun!)
• Write what you hear and feel on the Composer Study page.
• Shark coloring page

Week 6

• Listen to Flight to the Neverland from Hook
• Write what you hear and feel on the Composer Study page.
• Captain Hook and Peter Pan coloring page

Family Time:  We will be watching Hook together as a family this week, too.  Before we watch it, I will have them watch this short YouTube video, Jaws: The Importance of John Williams.  It plays a clip of the movie without the score.  Then, it shows the same clip with the score.  It is amazing to see the difference that adding music makes!  With this new information in their little brains, I will ask them to pay attention to how the music in Hook adds to each character and important scenes.  Have fun, enjoy John Williams' music and may the force be with you!!!  :-)