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Yesterday, as part of my series Stories in tune, I rounded up the various picture book versions of The Magic Flute we’ve recently been enjoying. Today I’ll describe the play all these books and music inspired in us…

In between reading the different versions of The Magic Flute lots of playing involving dressing up ensued where we were either serpents or princesses (if you are unfamiliar with the story of The Magic Flute there is a detailed synopsis here from Glyndebourne Opera ). We also considered trying to make our own flutes – the ones on Vegetableinstruments.com looked like a lot of fun! But eventually, inspired by this post from Silly Eagle Books and this project at enchantedlearning.com, we then set about playing “Papageno” and catching our own birds.

1. I cut out some small bird templates which M and J decorated and added eyes to.

2. M folded coloured paper concertina style, cut it to about 10cm long and then inserted it into a slot I had cut in the birds’ tummies to create wings.

3. M and I made cages for the birds. Each cage required 9 long pipecleaners. First we took 5 pipecleaners and laid them like a star, just over lapping in the centre by a centimetre or two.

4. We folded over the ends of the pipecleaners to attach them to each other, creating a “knot”. We bent up the pipecleaners about 5 cm away from the “knot”.

5. We twisted the loose ends of all 5 pipecleaners together tightly and then gently pulled the pipecleaners to create a bit of a bell shape.

6. We used the remaining pipecleaners to weave around the bell creating a cage.

7. We hung up the birds i

Welcome to the second post in a new mini-series here on Playing by the book – Stories in tune – all about picture books inspired by classical music.

In the first Stories in tune post I talked about picture book versions of Peter and the Wolf. This time round we are looking at, reading and listening to The Magic Flute by Mozart – a story I thought would lend itself naturally to the format of children’s picture books given its fairy tale-like quest to rescue an imprisoned princess with plenty of magic and mayhem along the way.

What I found with introducing Peter and the Wolf was that in the beginning, before they became familiar with the music, both my girls most enjoyed listening to the music when it was the sound track to the wonderful animation by Susie Templeton. Listening to the music just happened naturally, almost without them noticing that they were listening. Once they were familiar with the music, they then enjoyed listening to it on its own.

This listening-by-stealth was much more successful than trying to sit them down to listen to a piece of music without any “warming up” or preparation and so I did something similar with The Magic Flute – before sitting down with a book or turning on our CD player we watched a BBC animated (and abridged) version of this opera by Mozart on YouTube. Here’s the first part:

Here’s part 2 and part 3. I think this is the same animation as is available on this DVD, which for some reason you can get in the States but not in the UK.

Now this video may not please all of you, especially if you know The Magic Flute well, as the version in the animation is only 30 minutes long and consequently a great deal of music from the original opera is left out, the story is adapted to fit the time frame, and it is sung in English. None of these things will sell the animation to an opera buff, but all of these things combined to make the animation compulsive viewing for both my kids – even J was transfixed for the full 30 minutes.

Having viewed the video several times I then started playing the music in the house whilst we were getting on with other stuff and both girls clearly recognised the arias and were excited to hear them again (you can’t imagine how pleased I was at this!). It was at this stage I introduced the picture book versions I had found of The Magic Flute, and here’s what we thought of them: