Welcome to the Musical Storytime: Animal Adventure lesson. This engaging 45-minute session is designed for Junior Infants (ages 4-5) to introduce basic coding concepts through music, rhythm, and storytelling in a fun, interactive way. As the teacher, you'll facilitate activities that help students practice key skills including active listening, precise repetition of rhythms, and understanding conditional logic (IF/THEN rules) by responding to story triggers with actions or sounds. Students will also develop creativity by suggesting their own story elements and coding rules, fostering ownership and collaboration. Additionally, they'll explore sequencing and looping in narratives, linking these to real-world programming ideas like how computers follow instructions. To support varying attention spans, adjust pacing and group sizes as needed, and use enthusiasm and visual aids to keep everyone motivated. By the end, students will have created and presented their own short musical stories, building confidence in digital thinking skills.

This is a quick, fun warm-up to prepare the students for listening and reacting accurately.

Start by using simple body percussion (Clap, Snap, Pat, Stomp) to create a 4-beat sequence (e.g., Clap, Clap, Snap, Pat).

Have the students listen to your 4-beat sequence and then immediately repeat it back exactly.

Repeat this four or five times, changing your rhythm sequence each time. This drills the listening and immediate response skills needed for the story activity.

Check out the teacher notes for this step to see some different rhythms to try out with your class.

You can also invite a student to lead the class once they are familiar with the activity!

Introduce the story, "Animal Adventure".

Read the entire story through once, normally, without any pauses or student involvement.

Once completed, tell the students that you are going to turn this simple story into a computer program where certain words act as code triggers.

Write the initial, simple rules on the board for the whole class to follow. This is the first layer of code.

Establish 3-4 simple rules using easy-to-spot animal names from the story. You can use the following rules for this or make up your own!

Reread the story, but this time, the students must act as the computer. Every time you say one of the triggered words, the whole class must instantly perform the THEN action. If the word isn't on the list, they do nothing.

The students now take ownership by adding a second layer of code.

Ask the students to suggest 2-3 more animals or important words from the story (e.g., Tree, River, Jump).

Ask the class what the THEN action should be for these new conditions (e.g., "IF Tree, THEN point up" or "IF River, THEN make a gentle waving motion").

Reread the story one final time. The class now has 6-7 different conditional rules to keep track of, requiring total focus and precise execution.