Measuring the Sounds of Music

I'm a music lover and I couldn't wait to teach all about the stringed instruments. This was such a fun lesson for me and I'm pretty sure the kids enjoyed it too. 

After circle time we began our lesson with the question, "What instruments have strings?" I was happy to hear their answers and they knew a couple of them like guitars, and violins. I asked them if a piano had strings. As a group the vote was NO WAY! I asked "are you sure? How do you know?" I got some blank stares and crickets chirping in the background… One child strummed his air guitar and said "because you don't do this on a piano!" At this time I told them we were going on a field trip up stairs to my music room and we would find out for sure if a piano had strings. 

How fun for me to see them discover what the inside of a piano looks like. Strings and strings! More than any guitar or violin! They watched inside as I played keys and the mallets hit the strings to make music. It was kind of magical! 

 Everyone got a turn to come up and see inside. I even let them try to strum the strings. 

I had them look at the keys and I asked "Are there more black keys or white keys?" Some said black, some said white. Then we counted all of them. 52 white and 36 black. I asked, "Is 52 white keys more or less than 36 black?" It was still a split decision so I told them the right answer.

 After we were done with the piano, I grabbed my guitars and let them all have a turn playing on them. A couple of my girls wanted to sing and play for everyone. It was cute! We counted how many strings were on a guitar. 6! A much more manageable number to work with. phew!

It didn't end there. Out came the cello and violin! Everyone got a turn to play and explore these instruments as well. We counted the strings on these too. I taught that each string makes it's own sound. The big ones make a low sound, the small tight ones make a high sound.

 Here is where we did some extra learning… We measured the sound each string made. Which ones were the loudest? We experimented with putting more pressure on the bow and less pressure. We tapped the piano keys soft and then hard. We strummed the guitar hard and soft. We concluded that hard pressure on the strings makes a louder noise than soft pressure.

I don't know who had more fun with this activity but I suspect it was me. I loved giving a hands on learning experience to them. I hope that they go home and beg for a violin for Christmas now. Just kidding! But seriously parents, they are never too young to pick up a stringed instrument. 

After our little field trip upstairs, we made it back to our classroom and made a violin to play with. Aaaand, because I'm squeezing so much into our day, I didn't get any pictures (uggg). They were a little frustrating for a lot of the kids to make on their own so I ended up stringing and taping most of them after they were decorated. But if making them wasn't very fun, playing with them was. This class of mine loves pretend play!  

To end our very musical busy morning, we played a color sorting game with this cutout. We matched the colored music note to the key with the same color. This is pretty basic sorting for my class. When I told them what I wanted them to do they looked at me like "seriously, that is so last year…" Little smarty pants. So, I showed them that they can make it more difficult and use the notes to make their own music patterns and songs. They were more excited about that!  Mother Goose Time has made me very happy this month! So many musical activities for a very musical teacher. If only we had more time to get more in! 

Have a great week friends!

xoxo- M