ckorkmaz, Author at The STEM Discovery Campaign BlogThe STEM Discovery Campaign Blog

Music is an indispensable phenomenon in human life. Children need to learn, experiment and use sounds obtained from all kinds of materials. Their melodic concepts are different from those of adults. Preschoolers are primarily interested in sounds and wonder what happened. They tend to learn better in a rich and stimulating environment. The most important factor for the environment is the teacher.

For this reason, we decided to make our own musical instruments in my school to give more musical education to children and to develop their sense of music.

3 and 5-year-old students who took part in the project worked between April 1 and April 30.Our aim is to give children a sense of music and rhythm. To love music. Now they use their creativity to create musical instruments from materials.

How we decided?

Since we do not have a music classroom due to school facilities, we decided to create a music corner in the garden with the children.First, what is a musical instrument, what is it for, what types are there, how to make handmade sample instruments, what materials we will need, what are the shapes of musical instruments, etc. We started by researching its features.For this, we received support from websites such as Youtube, Pinterest and Google. Pictures were shown and videos were watched.Of course, while creating this music corner, we took care to use nature’s own materials. We used all kinds of materials that could be used for music, also using recyclable materials.

Activity 1:

And first we went out to the garden to explore.

The picture belongs and was provided by the Author – Attribute CC-BY–

Activity 2:

While examining the different musical instruments in the classroom after the different objects we found, “Should we make maracas, too?” When I said, they started thinking how to do it.Considering the use of waste materials, they thought that empty toilet paper, play dough box, empty bottles were suitable for maracas in the classroom. Children gave up plastics and decided to use maracas from rolled cardboard. They threw out small objects they found inside to make a sound. (lentils, stones, chickpeas, macaroni) And they decorated.

Activity 3:

A few days later, as one of the children entered the classroom, he had a walnut in his hand. To eat it, he had to break it first. He started hitting the walnuts together to break them.Just at that moment, I said, “Look how the walnuts sound,” to get their attention. When I said “can it be made of walnut, do you think a musical instrument”, we decided to try it.They watched a video of making a musical instrument from a walnut on Youtube. After getting the materials, they got to work.

We brought all the musical instruments they made to the garden and started to create our corner with materials such as pots, pans, wooden spoons and cones that they brought from the house.

We got to work by tying a rope to the ends of the spoons and ladles. First we decided what to put where. It was started to hang on metal with legs one by one by passing through the handles of the pot.