10 minute read
MAKING YOUR OWN MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
Jhodi Kennard, creator of www.getkidsintomusic.com shares some ideas for end of term activities on a budget!
It is coming up to the end of term, and concentration levels of the children in your classes are plummeting daily. You find yourself wondering what on earth you can do with them to keep their attention while they are tired from getting close to the end of term and distracted by the lovely weather out of the window, but that is still a good, educational activity to do.
How about getting them to make their own musical instrument? This is a great activity for children of all ages, but particularly primary aged children It is a bit different to the work that goes on the rest of the school year and may get their attention just by virtue of being a bit different. It is also a great fun activity with the added benefit of the children having something that they can take home, proudly showing off what they made in music class to their parents.
I have made musical instruments at home with my children over the years starting from when my youngest was about 3. My eldest is 9 and we will be continuing to make different instruments at home this summer. Both of them have always enjoyed making their own instruments, and the end up in our music box for years until they fall apart!
Making their own musical instrument is a very easily accessible way for the children to have an instrument of their own. Of course, the instruments they make are not the same as a real musical instrument. It can, and will fall apart eventually, it will not make the same sound as a real musical instrument, it will not have the same range of pitch or ability to control how you make that pitch, but it is theirs, and it will work. Making your own musical instrument does not come with the expense of buying or hiring a musical instrument, and is a great way of trying out how it feels to be able to play an instrument, to make your own music.
When we make our musical instruments, we generally construct the instrument itself and then decorate it. The children are given free rein to choose how to decorate their instrument from the materials we have at home - we have used paint, felt pens, crayons, washi tape, stickers, even some very pretty gaffer tape. They love being able to make their instruments look exactly how they want it to look, making it their own. Music is a great tool for developing a child’s skills in self-expression, as is art, and this activity beautifully combines the two.
It is easy to adapt each instrument to suit the age of the children you are teaching. Firstly, your choice of which instrument to make. Some musical instruments are harder for very young children to play than others - for example making a Japanese hand held pellet drum is easy for the youngest children in your care to play, whereas a set of panpipes may be more suitable for the older children. When constructing the instruments you can adapt how much of the actual construction the children do depending on your class’s age. When my youngest was 3 and 4, I would prepare the different parts of the instrument in advance and lay them out for her to choose from, she would stick them together and decorate them. My older child would cut shapes out to practise scissor skills, thread beads to develop his hand-eye co-ordination.
When we first started making these instruments together we just made the instrument, decorated it and had a go at playing it. It was great fun. As the children have got older, we have started to talk, as we go along, about why we have made the instrument the way we have - panpipes is a great example. Making panpipes allows you to talk about how different pitches are made, how the longer straws produce a lower notes, and shorter straws produce higher notes. When making drums with balloons stretched over a container (something I would not do with a large group of small children as inevitably one will try to put the balloon in their mouth!) We have talked about why balloons make a good material for this kind of drum, about the tension made by stretching the balloon can affect the sound the drum makes. Finally, as my son has got older, making musical instruments with him, and talking to him about why we constructed the instrument the way we did, has inspired him to design and even make his own musical instruments. He has designed his own balloon shaker, and a shaker that he constructed out of lego.
This is all very well, but with over stretched budgets, especially at the end of the school year, how do you get hold of the resources you need to make musical instruments with a class full of children? There are a couple of options, - you can buy them in, raid the stationery cupboard/art department if you have one, or the children’s parents if they would help you with the materials
Firstly looking at buying resources in. The best resource I have found for DIY musical instrument kits is the online retailer Baker Ross They have a number of different kits available in multipacks. These multipacks range from quite small packs of 3 or 4 to much larger multipacks that are suitable for schools. I find their prices to be very reasonable as well - I have found other DIY kits available for sale with other online retailers but they tend to be very complicated kits and expensive as well.
The advantages of buying your resources in:
they make life and this activity easy because everything is prepared and ready for you
the instruments you produce actually sound more like real musical instruments - a tambourine or a woodblock that sounds like a tambourine or woodblock
they look more like a real instrument, every child would have made something that looks good, and is realistic.
There are some disadvantages though, not least the expense involved in purchasing the kits themselves, and the fact that because everything is prepared for you there is less autonomy or opportunity for self-expression. All of the children will make an instrument that looks and sounds very much like everyone else’s.
Some of the kits feel more like a decorate your own instrument rather than a make your own instrument And with these kits, especially the wooden ones you have to think carefully about what you give the children to decorate the instruments with - for example, using washable paint, you need to give the instrument several coats of the paint, and so this would be a task that would need to be spread over a number of sessions to complete. If you are working with very young children you need to watch out for kits with small parts like bells as they tend to be brightly coloured, shiny and very tempting to try to swallow!
The option I prefer is to use materials you find at school, or ask the children to bring things in from home. I prefer to make instruments this way not just because the materials can often be found at home lying around, but it gives you a lot more flexibility to choose what you want to make, and how to tailor the instrument to be age-appropriate. Personally, while there are downsides to this approach (you have to actually get hold of the materials yourself, and the instrument you end up with will probably look very different to a real musical instrument, and will probably not sound anything like a real musical instrument), I find the benefits outweigh those downsides:
The advantages of using your own materials:
Instead of having to make whatever instruments a retailer has available to purchase, you can be really creative and make any instrument you feel like!
You can choose whatever materials you want to work with It is much cheaper than buying in supplies, with little to no upfront costs depending on how you get hold of the materials required.
Using materials found at home or in school can lead to discussions with the children about repurposing things that would ordinarily be thrown away, thinking about recycling at home.
On my blog you will find a number of different musical instruments that you could make with your children, but I will give you three here as a suggestion of musical instruments to start off with. There are detailed instructions on materials required, and step by step instructions for each of the instruments below if you click through on the link provided, and you will also find more suggestions for DIY musical instruments to consider making
DIY Kazoo
In the link below you will find step by step instructions for making the kazoo. Why is this a good instrument to start with, well it is easy It is easy to make, needing just 3 things to construct the instrument itself - the insert from a toilet roll, kitchen roll or gift wrap roll (the latter will need cutting up into suitable size sections), a piece of baking paper to cover one end of the cardboard tube, and an elastic band. It is also an easy instrument for children to play Kazoos make a fun sound, and are a great instrument that even 3 and 4 year olds can play independently
Click here for full instructions
Cardboard Box Guitar
This one is good for older and younger children The materials are easy to get hold of, and it can be made very simply, like in the blog post below, with just a cardboard box and some elastic bands; or the children can attach a kitchen roll insert to use as a handle. This is a great instrument to start talking to the children about how stringed instruments work, and about how different length or thickness of elastic bands can produce a higher or lower pitch.
Click here for full instructions
DIY Panpipes
This is a great instrument to make with slightly older children. Though I think my youngest was just 3 when we made them, she found it very hard to get any sound out of them at all. At the time, my eldest would have been 6 and he found it much easier to get a sound out of the panpipes. We made the panpipes out of plastic straws, because that is what we had at home. They can be made with paper straws and they will work, but they won’t last as well just because paper straws are less robust, and will deform, especially when wet. Nevertheless, they allowed me to talk to the children, especially my eldest, about some of the science behind how music is made - sound being vibration in air, about how longer straws produce lower notes, and shorter straws producing higher notes.
Click here for full instructions
Please note that if you are reading this article via Issuu's interactive mobile view the links may not be clickable. You can find these links in the desktop version of the magazine, or by visiting www.getkidsintomusic.com.
