Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Musical instruments

One of the assignments for one of my education classes - Teaching in the Primary Grades - was to create some kind of creative expressions something that could be used in an elementary classroom (i.e. bulletin boards, beanbags, calendars, puppets,props for a book, etc). Being the musical person I am, I decided to make some musical instruments out of recycled materials. My original plan was to make many different kinds of percussion instruments. My list included: tambourines, shakers, maracas, rainsticks, and castanets. I emailed several friends and asked them to save some of their trash for me. I mostly received water bottles and toilet paper tubes, so I decided to narrow my list of instruments down to two: maracas and shakers.

Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon creating instruments. Dori was kind enough to help me. The maracas were easy. We just poured some rice into them, glued the caps on, and painted the outsides. The shakers were a bit harder since we had to close the ends of the toilet paper tubes somehow. Dori came up with the idea of cutting pieces of construction paper a bit larger than the ends of the toilet paper tubes and taping them in place. That worked really well.

It was kind of challenging to come up with different designs to paint on each instrument. The end result was certainly nothing special, but I think it will serve its intended purpose.

I also got lots of cool paintbrushes out of the whole ordeal. Definitely worth it :P

2 comments:

momo8 said...

how fun. If you need a place to get rid of the water bottle maracas, Isaac and Benjamin's choir teacher just asked anyone if they had any maracas for a song they are doing. Recycle again!

Caitlin said...

I'm probably going to save these, but if you guys save up some water bottles, I can help the boys make some this weekend.