I’ve always loved music and played piano from a very young age.
I’m also excited to have enrolled Possum in a Mini Maestro program for the first term of 2013.
I can’t wait to see what instruments they have the kids play.
Here is a great activity you can do with your school aged children.
The great thing is that it incorporates learning about musical pitch and maths!!!!
Here is a great activity you can do with your school aged children.
The great thing is that it incorporates learning about musical pitch and maths!!!!
How great do these glasses look!
I simply added a few drops of food colouring to each glass.
I was quite mathematical about it because I wanted them all to be of similar shades, however, if I was to add say 5 drops to all of the glasses I would have a considerably dark colour in the one that had the least amount of water. So this is something you could discuss with your child and problem solve the solution. For me, I added 1 drop of colouring to the glass with the least amount and increased a drop with each glass as the volume of water increased.
I decided to use the end of a spoon to tap (carefully) each glass and test it’s sound.
Here I would pose questions –
“What happens if I tapped it at a different part of the glass? Does it make a difference?”
“What would happen if I used plastic instead of glass?”
“What other items could I use to tap the glass? Would the material make a difference to the sound?”
Now this is an activity that will require supervision AND parents are the best judge and will know if their child is capable to softly tap each glass to hear the various sounds.
Before I knew it I found myself starting to experiment!!!!
What happens when I add this water to this glass of water???
A flood of mathematical questions began to flood my head.
Some great questions you can ask and have your child test may be –
“What happens when I add this colour to this colour of water?”
“Do you think this volume of water to the glass with the most water?”
“What will happen if we leave these glasses for 30 minutes, what do you think they will look like? Will they change?”
“Which glass of water do you like the sound of the most? Can you play a tune?”
Grab a large sheet of paper and have the children write their questions down, compose an outcome and test their ideas. BRILLIANT!!!!
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I would LOVE to read any comments you have below.
Kate
Great activity! I love how you put the colors in there. It really makes the different levels of water contrast so the children see what is making the glass sound different.
Thank you Tulip. Kids love playing these simple music makers. 🙂
Now this is something I haven’t tried with my littlies yet and must do!! It is so fabulous and so simple to do. Thank you so much for sharing and I look forward to experimenting with it aswell with my kids. 🙂
Thank you Janice. Let me know how you and your kids go with this one. 😀
Wonderful.
Waldorf education recognises that Math and Music go hand in hand.
So they’re very incorporated in Steiner schools.
I love this activity.
Thank you 🙂
I completely agree! This was a great activity that you can’t help but find yourself playing music whilst creating math. Thank you for sharing this. 😉
How fun.. love it how it allows for learning about colours and colour mixing at the same time. What happens when we add a bit of blue water to the yellow water? How will the sound and colours change?
OOOh, it would be fun to also blindfold children and have them put the glasses in order of most to least volume judged purely on the sound. awesome! haha (ok, getting too excited about this now, lol)
haha! I love your excitement! Blindfolding would be great! 🙂
The possibilities are really quite endless. It is an activity that you can easily find yourself investigating and experimenting. Oh I totally love the blindfold idea. I wonder what the colour would be by the end of it too. hahaha
What fun….i had forgotten all about this activity…thanks for reminding me and i loved that you added colour…opens up a whole new avenue for learning!
Thank you Jodie. There are so many different avenues to go down with this one. Great activity and lots of fun.
Music class sounds fantastic! 🙂 Let us know how that goes! 🙂
What a fun activity – and I too would not be able to resist mixing colours at the end! 😉
If there was room I would have had them all in the one glass. hahaha
It was really great fun. Thanks for your comment Bekka.
So cool. I must try this it looks awesome!
Thanks Renee. I appreciate you taking the time to comment.
Such a nice, simple(and colourful) activity for the kidlets! The girls will LOVE this!
It is very colourful Penny. Actually I’m in need of buying some more food colouring. Eek!
Looks like fun! I’d love for you to link it to Mom’s Library if you haven’t already!
http://lifewithmoorebabies.blogspot.com/2013/01/moms-library-4-for-me.html
What a great idea!
Thanks Danya.
We have rainbow water glass jars sitting on our kitchen window sill. I can’t believe we’ve never tried filling them to different levels and making music with them. Fab idea. Thanks!
Thanks Ness. It is so simple and you can have kids making music before you know it. Great for looking at capacity too.
Such a pretty way to explore sound. I don’t really do anything with music deliberately in mind, not like with other ideas… but I think we will try this one for sure!
Thank you kindly for commenting. It’s such an easy way to get kids making music and it sounds really very beautiful.
I have been wanting to do this for a while now, you have encouraged me to do just do it. I think all four of my kids would enjoy this one.
Thanks Bec. I think kids of school age love this activity and it’s amazing how far it can go.
Ah Thank you for this! I work in school age and we have a new program plan outline we have to follow which is we have to follow each area of school (science, math, the arts etc.) and connect it with what theyre learning in school so this is perfect!