Somebody's Watching Me: Characters in the Music Classroom

Silly characters on the wall bring magic and fun to music lessons.

A yellow peppermint looks amazed that they know what forte means.

Making a happy place for my students and myself is priority number-one. If Mrs. Summa ain’t happy, music ain’t fun. And if music ain’t fun, every kid is going to go back to class and moan about how they did not get to hear any lame jokes or hear any strange noises in class today.

You should get characters for your classroom! They’re just like puppets, but you do not have to have a hand free to use them.

Yes, I admit it. Lame jokes are my bread and butter. And I like to laugh. It is my favorite hobby. For the record, my laugh is not delicate. It’s loud, obnoxious, and makes people wander into my classroom to see what is so funny. It is usually a joke about shaking our booties.

Making kids laugh is amazing. I feel like the most famous person in the school. Pretty sure the kids would push me aside for the lunch lady (cookies are good). I am still in their top 5 favorite people, though.

Talking to the Walls

Sometimes I try to bring my comedy bits home, but my family doesn’t think jokes about frog butts are near as funny as my first graders do. Plebians. I know what kids like -- and it’s often their teacher yukking it up with goofy paper characters on the wall.

One of these balloons has seen some stuff.

My classroom always has characters for the class to interact with. They have different personalities and moods. Some of them get so popular that they get names. A couple of years ago we had a fish on the wall named Fortnite the Fish. The kids would beg to perform for that fish once they had learned their parts. Kids are weird, but this works, so we do it ALL THE TIME.

Fortnite The Fish being chased out of town by a hungry otter.

I give the characters backstories to entertain myself. What kinds of backstories, you ask? Here are my favorites!

Kidney Stone Carl

Our school had a candy theme one year, so I decided to make weirdo candy dudes to hang around my classroom. I bought an adorable clip art set from Etsy, downloaded a Photoshop face stamp, and brought them to life. This turned out to be an amazing decision. These sweeties were a HUGE hit with the kids. Everyone had their favorite. And my favorite was a sad roll of Smarties named Kidney Stone Carl.

Poor Carl has had better days.

I had a kidney stone make itself known during our school talent show the year before. Carl looks exactly how I felt. Any time I was having a rough day, I would look at Carl and know that even though it was bad, I did not have a kidney stone. So I had that going for me at least.

When kinders would use a speaking voice instead of a singing voice on a song, I would tell them they made Carl sick, and that we had to use singing voices to cheer them up. This sounds like a terrible thing to say, but the payoff was that I had a class full of kindergarteners singing earnestly to a sick candy roll on the wall, and comedy does not get much better than that.

Leaky Louise

In the year our school voted for an Over the Rainbow theme, I decided to have adorable little forest creatures in galoshes and holding umbrellas. I downloaded several clip art sets from Etsy and started layering them together. They were so whimsical and beautiful!

Poor Louise in their time of stress.

But the stars of the show were the clouds. Each sweet watercolor cloud had a different kawaii face. Some were raining sweet little raindrops. But Leaky Louise’s face was yelling in surprise, and it looked like they had just sneezed and had a little accident. While I did not bring this one up to the kids, It always gave me a good chuckle when I needed a pick-me-up!

Sam the Sneaky Spy

My favorite characters ever are my balloons. I bought balloon clip art packs from Etsy and did what you knew I would do...put faces on them. They looked amazing on the wall with black ribbon for string! The kids adored them - and they were super easy to make since they printed out on regular printer paper.

Sam the Sneaky Spy (left) with one of their sophisticated friends.

My classroom decor is classified by color and musical element, so I made sure I had enough balloons for each hue. One of my balloons looked like a super sneaky balloon named Sam, so I hung him up on the other side of the room from his Rainbow Mood. Sam went right in the middle of Yellow Form. The instant I hung up the Sam balloon, I knew the story - Sam was a super sneaky spy who was going to meet an informant.

The kids liked this story immediately.. They even decided that one of the balloons in the Purple Harmony section was the agent trying to hunt down the spy and stop him from telling all of our musical secrets. I loved it, and it made that lesson more relaxed and easier to structure.

You should get characters for your classroom! They’re just like puppets, but you do not have to have a hand free to use them. Hop on over to Etsy to look for your own clipart or stay tuned for future posts featuring links to my favorites!