Homemade Musical Instruments

Ok so what kind of kid blogger does homemade musical instruments with her three year old while the 6 month old baby is asleep??

Me that's who!

Oops.

Apart from the fact that we woke the baby up with our instrument playing, this activity was so much fun. I'd been wanting to do it for ages. I had been gathering and collecting materials, and finally had the time this week. 

So here's what we used...

• Paper plates
• Rice & marbles
• Wrapping paper & ribbon
• Sticker decorations
• Bells
• Spoons
• Various kinder surprise eggs
• Glad wrap cardboard tube
• Empty formula tin
• Sticky tape, glue, scissors, stapler, hole puncher etc.
• Balloon
• Plastic bottle
• Tissue box & rubber bands (this was going to be a guitar but we had already done so much I gave up!)

As with most craft activities, there's always something else you need to grab while you're busy making, so not everything is pictured above.

Here's What We Made!

Here's how we made everything...(R-L, top - bottom)

• For the maracas we filled the kinder surprise eggs with rice and stuck them between two spoons using electrical tape.
• This shaker was made from a giant kinder egg (could have been from Easter time??). It's just got rice in it. Done!
• We popped a couple of little jingle bells into the balloon before I blew up it (although I must admit, this is our second attempt - the first was decorated beautifully with stickers and then got stepped on!)
• Miss M loves the rain stick... We sealed up one end of the tube with a lid & tape, then added rice and dried spaghetti. Then we sealed the other end and decorated it.
• The tambourine turned out so pretty. Miss M got to work decorating it while I started threading ribbon through each of the bells. We punched holes around one plate, stapled them together and then tied the bells on.
• The drum was pretty simple - the formula tin just needed to be decorated.
• Again the trusty kinder surprise eggs came in handy to make more shakers.
• I love to use these plastic Voss water bottles for our discover bottles. I just put our old batch of rainbow rice in it and Miss M wanted to add marbles, so it became an "I spy marble discovery bottle".
• Finally we used marbles in some of our other shakers. We quickly learnt that these are much louder than the rice shakers!

I loved to listen to how Miss M described the noises that her instruments made. The balloon was like 'thunder' and the tambourine was a 'tinkling sound'.  She was kept really busy and really engaged (until we had to stop when the baby woke up of course!). 

My favourites are the spoon maracas! :)

Have you ever tried this before? What other instruments could we make to add to our collection?

Lauren xx