My kids are really into music these days, whether singing,
dancing, or playing instruments.
One of my favorite pictures of Abby is one of her clapping and dancing
at Bree’s cooking party – while everyone else is sitting and listening, and no
music is on, mind you.
Briana asks me if we can make instruments out of the blue this
week, so we set out to do so. I
only wish she hadn’t asked me while we were in the middle of working on scales,
which I had planned to blog about, but the excitement of making instruments
trumps the excitement for making our scales and I couldn’t get the kids to
focus after that. Oh well, that
happens with kiddies sometimes. So
I table our beautiful and half constructed scales until next week and move on
to an unplanned activity about making musical instruments.
I tell the kids that there are 4 kinds of instruments.
1.
Percussion, which you bang with a mallet,
2.
Strings, which you pluck
3.
Woodwind, like my clarinet, where you blow
across a reed
4.
Brass, which you blow into without a reed.
We talk about percussion instruments that we know – the
drum, bells, the triangle, and maracas, although they are not banged with a
mallet. Bree drags a stool from
the bathroom and begins playing the drums…although we have 2 drum sets in the
house. I decide that if we were
going to talk about instruments instead of weights I was going to switch from
Diet Coke to Coffee. Yes, coffee
gets a capital C out of respect.
That gave me an idea for our first instrument. Instead of doing the obvious banging of an old oats carton
as a drum, especially since using disposal chopsticks to bang on things can be
dangerous at our house, we will make maracas.
I allow Bree to pour some coffee beans into my Diet Coke
bottle, explaining that as the small coffee beans bounce off of each other and the
walls of the bottle it will make a sound just like maracas make.
This was a slight mistake and required a long clean-up. This is why I like to preplan and think
through the activities, but we made clean up part of maraca making and move
on. The kids pick up the coffee
beans off of the floor and put them in the bottle.
Then we play with our maracas. When we shake them slowly we sing out ‘andante’ very
slowly. When we shake them quickly
we sing out ‘allegro allegro allegro’ quickly. I could have gone with more extremes like using grave or
largo for slow and presto for fast, but they use andante and allegro in music
class so I go with those.
Next we talk about stringed instruments that we know – the
guitar, the vioin, the cello, and the bass. Little Einsteins, a tv show that they like, does a good job
with the stringed instruments.
I grab a couple of differently sized rubber bands and some
kiddie bowls and we make the center of a stringed instrument. It was serious business for the kids to
get their rubber bands on, as you can see.
Then we play and listen closely to hear the different sounds
that the different sizes of rubber bands make.
Then we talk about woodwind instruments that we know – the
clarinet and the oboe. I told them
that the flute is also a woodwind even though it doesn’t have a reed because
you are still blowing air across something and not directly into it like you do
with brass instruments. They didn’t
quite understand what I meant by blowing air across a reed so we abandon making
instruments to go upstairs and look at my clarinet and it’s reeds. And I leave my phone downstairs accidentally,
so no more pictures.
Then we talk about the brass instruments that we know – the
trumpet and the trombone. I tell
them about the French horn, which I always thought was pretty cool.
We decide that rather than going back downstairs for a
while, we’d curl up together in my bed and watch an episode of Little Einsteins
before dinner.
Sometimes it works to abandon your plans and just go with
the flow. That’s the very cool and
laid back musician in me talking now, you dig. Don’t worry. I
don’t let her out very often. I enjoy
the sound of a plan coming together too much.
<3 Pedigreed Housewife
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