Making Instruments-Our Project Continues

Our study of musical instruments has been going really well.  We had some wonderful visitors to class demonstrating their instruments for us. We've also gone on two field trips; one to the local middle school to interact with their band and then to the High School to see their wind ensemble.  On both trips the children were able to use the instruments as well as ask about them and photograph them.   Some of the non-fiction books we have in our classroom show how to make several different instruments.  The children selected a few that they wanted to try and make.  I spent an evening combing Home Depot and the dollar stores and here is what we made.

Using wood blocks we gathered from scraps and metal kick plates, the children made xylophones.  The mallets were made using a pencil, nail hammered into the top and wrapped with duct tape.  

The wood pieces have an indentation in the middle of them to allow the metal to vibrate.  For the wood without this indentation we had to put something under the metal plates.  We experimented with other pencils, small wood pieces and toothpicks.  The small wood pieces worked the best.  

For the horns, I purchased a garden hose and cut it into pieces along with several funnels of various sizes.  This and a roll of duct tape were all we needed.  The children were able to insert the funnels, secure them with duct tape, decide how they want the horn to wrap and secure this with duct tape as well. 

The tricky part came when learning how to blow.  You have to blow like a real horn with pursed lips.  It takes practice.  When my daughter Jessie visited she showed them all how to blow.  Many of them remembered and after several days of trying, they were able to get it. Now into our second week of playing them, they are getting really good at producing different sounds.  They enjoy playing for each other.  We keep them in the classroom where they have access to them.  They can get the horns independently and play them during our long activity time.  Most days the horn players walk around with their horns wrapped over an arm while they play.  

A couple of children chose to make a flute.  We used bamboo and drilled holes into the pieces.  We haven't had much success with the flutes, but they enjoyed the process of making them.

The children also embellished their instruments by painting them with liquid water colors or colorful making tape on the horns.

There certainly is a lot of joyful noise in our classroom these days!

A New Perspective-Under Table Drawing

To give a new perspective to drawing in class, we taped a large piece of rolled paper onto the underside of the table.  We placed pillows under the table and buckets of different writing materials each day; markers, silkies, rainbow crayons.

The children used big arm movements to draw.  It was a collaborative effort as they laid down in groups often having to figure out how to fit in to the rather small space. We are always encouraging problem solving!! They paper was there all week and they were able to go under and draw anytime during our activity time.  

One boy took one of the mirrors we had out for a block building activity and used it under the table to look at the drawing and then to look at others around him. He then taught his friends how to do this.  

Give this under the table drawing a try.  We may be fostering the next Michelangelo!

A Problem Solving Challenge In the Preschool Class

Posing a question for children to try and answer by planning and testing their ideas fosters creativity and problem solving.   It also creates a wonderful environment for team building.  

The challenge proposed here was "How can you move the balls from one tray to the next without touching the carpet?"  The trays were placed on each side of a large rectangular carpet.  We added cove molding, PVC piping cut in half, our regular blocks, some flexible tubing, ping pong balls and masking tape.  

Some children tried to build up much like a bridge and had to deal with support issues.

Others made long paths and had to figure out how to keep them from moving and separating.

Others built paths with sides to prevent the balls from rolling out.

As children returned to this activity each day during the week, the ideas became more elaborate as they built on the trials and errors of past days and implemented ideas seen tried by others around them.  

They even started to record their ideas on the clipboards that are always kept in the block area.  

Later in the week, we added wiffle balls and golf balls to see if these would react differently in their paths.

This inspired children who do not usually play in the block area to give it a try.  New combinations of children played together as they shared their ideas and worked on a common goal.  

How do you promote problem solving in your classroom?  Have you tried giving your students a challenge along with some open ended materials and time to try and try again? I would love to hear about it.  Tell me your ideas in the comments or link your own blog posts here as well.  

Where Is The Shark? A Positional Word Lesson

We had been discussing and using positional words in my class of four year olds.  One of our favorite songs, is 

There's A Spider on My Head

There's a Spider on my toe, on my toe.

There's a Spider on my toe, on my toe.

There's a Spider on my toe

I wish that he would go

There's a Spider on my toe, on my toe.

Then use knee, leg, middle, arm, hand...whatever body parts you want to and come up with a rhyme for all the way up to your head.  As we sing, I balance a spider on each part.  

We switched up the song for fun and used a Beanie baby shark that I used when I sang the song. 

Then we  made a book using photographs of the children with the shark in different positions.  We used predictable, repetitive text to promote independent re-reading of the book.  

The children enjoy reading the book and seeing the photographs of their classmates.  They feel like "readers" and are gaining many concepts of print as they read and reread this book.  

Check out the post on The Spatial Awareness Game which would pair well with this song and activity.

Problem Solving with Loose Parts

On our playground we are gathering a wonderful collection of loose parts that the children can move around as they play.  This collection includes stumps, tires, boards, rocks, shells, sticks, bamboo pieces and more. 

This week I gave them a challenge.  They had to build something that allowed them to cross the large blacktop section of our playground from the area with the play structure to the sand box area without stepping on the blacktop.  

The children worked to figure out how to do this.  Sometimes they pressed on with their own ideas, and other times they worked together trying out and commenting as each part of the structure came to life.

Some attempts were failures, but they gathered information from those attempts and tried different solutions; giving more support, finding a lower stump, a wider board, etc.  

We were nearby commenting on what we could see, "I see you went and got a wider board to see if that would give you more support.", or encouraging them to think about improvements, "That board keeps slipping off that stump.  What can you do about that?"  Reminding them about safety, "As you test it, keep your arms out.  Be ready to fall."  

They did meet the challenge and were able to make it across that first morning.  Each time outside for an entire week, they would tweak the "course" adding to it or making it go in different directions.  More and more children became interested in this play as they wove their ideas into one.  

During this process there were many times I was tempted to step in and tell the children something was unsafe or wouldn't work, but that would have denied them the experience of testing limits and trying to solve problems on their own. (Of course, we were there to step in if something would have caused real danger)  Below is another example of this.

  

The boy wanted to step on the end of this long board and walk down it.  I knew that if he did that, the board would flip up and he would fall.  I could have told them to move the board and changed their entire idea.

Instead I showed them the different sizes of the board on each side of the stump. I asked them what they though would happen if he stepped on the end.  They also agreed it didn't have support and he'd probably fall.  So, then, back to them, "what can you do about that?"  

They decided to have one person stand on the end of the board while the other walked on it.  

With a reminder to "be ready to fall", I stood by to support them as they tried their idea.  

It worked!  Then without any teacher intervention they decided to switch places so the other child could try it.  They did this trading of places for quite a long time.  

Risk taking is an important part of learning new things.  Coming up with an idea and then testing it out, reworking it and trying it again, is a critical process to learn as one becomes a life long learner.  

That requires us as adults, to step back and allow risks to be taken...to be there for support, but to not take over... to say "yes",  when our inclination may be to stop them "just in case they might get hurt."

What kind of challenge can you pose outside today?