Easy Musical Instruments for Kids to Make

Making your own musical instruments is a lot of fun and something that some kids will do on their own without prompting. But these ideas for musical instruments that kids can make will inspire you and them to make music with things you probably already have around the house.

This spinning hand drum, for instance, is made with a cardboard tube and some flat cardboard, as well as basic crafting supplies. Get the instructions from Marcie in Mommyland. (I’ve done a similar drum with paper plates.) Or make a paper plate tambourine that’s an art project and musical instrument in one like this one from Kids Craft Room.

Take the shoebox guitar up a notch with these adorable jar lid banjos from The Craft Train. Kids will have as much fun embellishing them as they will playing them.

How about a thumb piano? This one from Thrifty Fun uses bobby pins and a block of wood, or you can make something similar with wooden sticks and a paper plate, as shown at Kodaly and Orff Music Teachers Blog.

Clapping sticks made from paint stirrers are also a fun project both to decorate and to play. Try painting the base color yourself and letting kids decorate with paint or paint pens to make the project go a little faster. Get all the details from Laughing Kids Learn.

How about a couple of xylophones? This idea of using wrenches is really fun, and it doesn’t harm the wrenches so you can still use them as tools when the kids are done playing. Get the instructions from De tout et de rien (instructions are in English and French).

Or try the old different levels of water in glasses experiment to make some pretty music. Still Playing School makes this one even more fun by adding food coloring to the water and taking the play to the light table. So pretty!

Using Music as Therapy In a world where life can get pretty overwhelming, we’re all on the lookout for ways to heal, find solace, and discover our true selves. And you know what? There’s something truly extraordinary that has been rocking our world for ages, and it goes by the name of music. Yep, you heard that right! Music has this incredible power to lift us up, inspire us, and even heal our souls. That’s why more and more therapists and healers are embracing music therapy as a way to tap into the transformative potential of melodies and beats.

Hand Held Music Maker

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Passover Seder Plate Crafts

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

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