We are a household of music lovers. We love to listen to music mostly, but Ghostwriterdaddy is a bit of a muso in real life too. He’s been in numerous bands and used to DJ when he owned his own record shop. As a result, our play room has one wall that is lined with hundreds of vinyls and there are instruments throughout the house, both of the adult and child variations. And me? I am not musical. I’ve been described as tone deaf actually, but that doesn’t stop me helping to nurture the kids in music play. The preschooler has always loved my teaching CDs (he calls it singing and dancing) and quite often we pop one on for a little singing session. I wanted to extend these sessions a little though, so we decided to make our own musical instruments. This is what we did.

We used:

• rainbow rice and pasta mix
• tin foil trays with lids
• an empty coffee jar with lid
• spoons, bowls and jugs to pour and scoop
• the tuff spot

The kids love playing with rainbow rice; it’s a lovely sensory play material and one of the best things about it is the sounds that it makes as you transfer it from container to container. It was the preschooler that noticed the rice sounded like rain (we have in the past made a rain stick with rice, tin foil and an empty Pringles tube- but that’s another post!) and he started to experiment with different containers.

He spent a while separating the rice from the pasta and noted that the sounds were different. I took the opportunity to talk about pitch and we noted that the larger pieces of pasta made a low sound, while the rice made a high sound when we dropped them into plastic cups. Then we made our own instruments:

• We filled one foil tray with lots of rice and pasta and popped a lid on top.
• We filled one foil tray with less than half the amount of pasta and popped a lid on top.
• We filled an empty coffee jar with some rice and pasta and crewed the lid on tight.

We talked about which tray had more and which had less and we made predictions about what sounds they would make. The preschooler was sure that the tray with the least amount of rice would make a high sound- and he was right!

We then talked about the ways in which we could use our instruments to make sounds. We came up with three actions:

• pat
• shake
• roll

The preschooler was able to tell me the initial sounds for each of the words and when I had written them down onto sticky labels I asked him to choose which one went on which instrument. He decided that the trays should be ‘pat’ and ‘shake’ and the jar should be ‘roll’. Clever boy! We then spent some time sounding out and reading the words and I wrote them on the chalkboard too so that the preschooler could trace over them with his finger tips.

The preschooler enjoyed learning basic musical vocabulary and I was pleased to get a little reading practise in too. Later on, we made a huge star shape from the rest of our rainbow rice and I invited the children to combine their instruments with sensory play. The preschooler took great pleasure in reading the labels to his sister and helping her use the instruments correctly. I also heard him tell her about the different sounds the instruments made and they had a little jamming session!

We loved this simple activity and I think that allowing children to make their own instruments is a fantastic way to explore lots of musical concepts. We looked at ways to use instruments and specifically pitch; to extend the activity we could also talk about using the instruments to compose tunes and for making longer and shorter sounds too. Music is such an important element of our every day lives and seeing the children’s play light up with sounds that they have created is wonderful! As the quote quite rightly insists: music is what feelings sound like and I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

You can read more super ideas for learning through play at Susanne’s blog Ghostwritermummy