The final project in our science unit on Sound was for the students to make their own musical instruments.
Here was the criteria we came up with together as a class:
- Does it make a sound?
- Is it a percussion, wind, or string instrument? (student must be able to tell us)
- Can the pitch or notes change?
- Did you make it yourself?
- Is it creative?
We had a lot of maracas on the day of the presentations (well, I was told we had a lot of maracas... I was at a meeting the day they presented most of their instruments). This tells me a lot of my students didn't quite grasp the idea of pitch. They thought that shaking their maracas slow gave off a low pitch and shaking it fast made it a high pitch.
Since I wasn't there they graded each others instruments using the above criteria.
On the 2nd day of presentations (the day I was there) I had them play hot cross buns on their instruments (because it is a simple tune and they had already learned how to play it on their recorders)... I imagine the maraca players may have finally understood that their instruments could not play that song and therefore the couldn't play different notes like they were earlier claiming they could.
Anywho, I was really impressed with the instruments they made (I think we had a lot of parent/older sibling involvement).
There was apparently a really impressive guitar on the first day of presentations but that student took it home with her that same day... so I never saw it.