Musical Glasses

You can all recall dinging on your glasses at a wedding reception, or when you were bored at a restaurant as a kid, right? It's a simple little thing that reinforces the concept of vibration producing sound (which we started in this activity), and the factors that are involved in making different pitches - high or low sounds.

This is good on a too-rainy, or too-hot day when kids are getting a little antsy. :-)

Gather materials:

• Glasses (Glasses with a stem are best for the sound, but I doubt you'll want to break out your fine crystal for your preschooler to play with... So, tall glasses will work well too.)
• Water in differing amounts per glass (test out the sound of each to make sure you can hear differences in pitch)
• Metal spoons
• Optional - food coloring for added fun. 

Gather kiddos to table. Mine saw me putting out glasses of water and immediately came to see what was going on. 

Talk about sound being made by vibration. Demonstrate that tapping a glass (around the rim is best for the most resonance) makes the glass vibrate. The more glass available to vibrate (i.e. less water) the higher the pitch (sound), and the less glass available to vibrate (i.e. more water) produces a lower sound. 

Demonstrate the different pitches and how to *gently* tap the glass.

(If you wanted to add food coloring to the different glasses, that's great too... we did a few)

"Oooooooohhh......" 

Let kid/s give it a try and make their own combinations of sounds. 

Talk about which ones are high-pitched and low-pitched and the in-betweens and why. 

Especially with my boys, I had to keep an ear on their "gentle" tapping, but they kept at this for a while on their own and seemed to enjoy it a lot. Yay! 

J had the most fun playing this one that sounded like a fire engine bell:

Have fun! 

Easter Egg Maracas

This post is dedicated to my friend, Katie, who reminded me of this idea, since she is a musically-inclined momma too!

Plastic eggs can turn into great little shakers, and these are super easy to make.
Here's what we did to make our festive toys:

Gather some empty plastic eggs, a basket to put the finished ones in, some painter's or strong scotch tape, and things to fill eggs with (like dry beans, rice, pasta, pony beads, etc.). We used stickers to decorate these eggs. I chose to go temporary with these things since I'll need the eggs on Sunday for an egg hunt!

I thought I'd take this one more "musical" step forward by filling the eggs with different materials. Then, we could talk about the timbre (pronounced tamber... just in case you're not used to using that word...) and match sounds after putting them together.

So, we gathered random materials. K thoroughly enjoyed being put in charge of collecting the sticks.

 We used beans, rice, jingle bells, pennies, pom-poms, little sticks and little plastic CARS figures (which was very perplexing to K.. who wondered why on earth does mommy want me to put cars in eggs... She's lost it).

Next, the boys put some of each material into their eggs so we had two eggs of each.

A little messy, but not too bad....

Mommy taped the eggs closed and then the boys decorated them with stickers.

All the eggs were put in the basket and we each chose two whose sound we liked best (no one chose the pom pom ones... can't imagine why...) and sang "If you're happy and you know it, shake your eggs (SHAKE, SHAKE, SHAKE).... Then we switched to the other person's eggs and sang again.

J was ready to be done by now, so K and I moved on to identifying same sounds.
I made a list of each material and he had to check it off as he found the match.

We also talked about each sound as each egg was shaken.

He did great and identified them all easily. Guess I'll need to move on to something more challenging next time...

Have you made your egg shakers yet this season??
Have fun!