We are in summer and vacations are a good time to invent new games, to have fun as a family while the little ones learn. Today we propose a series of musical activities that can take up leisure time and, at the same time, be fun, interesting and helpful.
They will also help develop the musical abilities of the little ones, learning to discriminate sounds according to their timbre, the quality of the sound that we could relate to color and that helps distinguish one instrument from another, or that characterizes the voices of different people .
We start with a simple proposal. It's about sitting on the floor in a circle. A simple phrase is established that has to be said, for example: "Summer is fun." Everyone closes their eyes except one person, who will touch any of the participants, who has to pronounce the sentence. The rest have to guess who has been the person who has spoken.
The following activity also has a manual labor component. We must collect cardboard boxes that are the same size. You can also use plastic boats. It is important that the external appearance of all of them be the same, so they can be lined with wrapping paper.
The boxes are filled two by two with different elements: rice, nuts, pebbles, dried chickpeas, semolina or anything else that comes to mind (tightly closed the boxes if there is a risk of being thrown into the mouth). The game is like "Find your pair", that is, it consists in choosing one of the boxes and shaking it to make it sound and find the corresponding couple attending to the sound bell. The more pairs of boxes, the better and more fun.
The sounds of a rocket, of animals ...
We offer you now some activities that focus on the distinction of sound from the point of view of height. It is not about doing different sessions but, we show you the games as a brainstorm, hoping that you choose the ones you like the most at all times and mix them the way you want, providing other variants.
But by following some division, we have focused on the qualities of sound. We do not need to mention them to the little ones (some games can be practiced from a very young age) but after four or five years they can know these concepts. Without forgetting the primary objective: to have fun.
The next activity consists in the construction of a small space rocket with a cardboard roll (of toilet paper, kitchen paper…). Once decorated, we will make the rocket take off, and as it rises we will increase the height of the sound, so that each time it corresponds to a sharper sound.
Once it reaches the top, the spacecraft will begin the descent, with the corresponding sound, which will be increasingly serious. The movement accompanies the emitted sound at all times, so that the ascent and the high positions are associated with the high and low sounds and the low positions with the low sounds. Children will learn to be astronauts right away ...
We can also search animals that emit loud sounds and imitate them, such as a lion, an orangutan, a great Dane; the same with animals that produce high-pitched sounds, such as a bird, a little mouse ...
In this way large animals are associated with serious sounds and vice versa, which is the same as with musical instruments: large ones (tuba, double bass) generate serious sounds, while small ones (piccolo, violin) produce sharp sounds.
A variant of this last activity is to look for other sound sources other than animals, such as machines (a boat, a tractor for serious sounds or a drill, a mixer for high-pitched sounds), to end, finally, with musical instruments.
In addition we remind you that in classical music there are many examples of animals, surely you can invent new games from these compositions.
We hope that these ideas of musical games make you spend some fun times with your children on holidays or at any time of the year, at birthday parties ... Soon we will return with more very rhythmic and melodious ideas.
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In Babies and more | Fun classical music for children, Activities with music for children and babies
