Homemade Musical Instruments

Earlier this month, on PreK+K Sharing I wrote "Making Music With Young Children",  about making musical instruments with household items. I have had several requests to write about some of the instruments we've made and currently utilize in our music center. We've made a variety of shakers, Chinese twist drums, coffee can balloon drums and bongos! 

I wanted to make sure the readers here knew where to find this post. I'd hate for anyone to miss out! Please stop over to PreK+K Sharing and check it out!




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Celebrating Chinese New Year in Pre-K

GUNG HAY FAY CHOY!!! Yesterday was the start of the Chinese New Year. It's the Year of the Dragon! We celebrated the occasion by reading a story and making paper lanterns to decorate our classroom. The children chose either yellow or red construction paper and decorated it however they wished.

They folded the paper in half and traced lines with a ruler. The next step was to cut on the line, without cutting all the way through. This year's group has really struggled with cutting skills, so this was great practice. 

We stapled them together to make a cylinder shape.

They turned out pretty cute! Later, we punched holes in the top and ran string through the top so we could hang them up in our classroom. 

I discovered this wonderful little lift -the- flap book, "Dragon's Dance" by Joan Holub. It has great illustrations, easy to understand text and is quite informative, giving the reader a nice glimpse of families celebrating Chinese New Year. It was a great way to introduce the holiday traditions some children celebrate! 

Gung Fat Hay Choy! Happy Year of the Dragon!

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Chinese New Year 2011

We celebrated Chinese New Year this year! It's not something we usually get to spend any time on with so many other things we've got going on. Teacher Tom has written some wonderful posts about the things his classes do. (Be sure to check out: Gung Hay Fat Choy, Dragons and Fantastic Creatures, The Boy Who Painted Dragons, and New Years Dragons and Tape Off ). Truth be told, I know next to nothing about Chinese New Year. I have a Chinese American student this year and wanted to make sure we included his traditions into our classroom celebrations.

We made paper lanterns out of construction paper. This was quite an exercise in cutting and following directions. Every year's group of students does some tasks quite skillfully and some with great difficulty. This year's group just cant seem to get the hand of cutting folded paper to make multiples. We've been practicing this skill a lot lately since I know this is something they'll do quite a bit in kindergarten. I had to pull out the tape to fix a few that cut way too far, but that's okay. The purpose was the cutting practice and not a perfect lantern. We hung them around our room for decoration.

We talked a bit about dragons and how the western culture thinks of them as evil, fire breathing creatures and how the Chinese culture reveres them for power, strength and luck.

We read a few books about Chinese New Year that furthered our understanding of Gung Hay Fat Choy traditions.



Gung Hay Fat Choy!