As part of our unit on xylophones, we invited the children to explore some simple and colorful fun with musical notes….
This process was a little different for our students to try as we hadn’t tried drawing our own songs before. So before the children began, I demonstrated to the children what a quarter note looks like and how to draw a colorful song by changing the color of each note to match one of our colorful cups…
The goal of this process was to focus on color and color matching. Already out on the table was a basket of markers and sentence strips for the children to draw their own musical notes.  The markers were the same colors as our colorful xylophone cups and the same colors as our DIY xylophone mallets (read Xylophone Painting to learn more about our DIY mallets)…
I left my song out for the children to see but just as they always do in my classroom, the children created their notes in their own way…
This was one of those processes that didn’t interest every child in the classroom but the children who did give this a try did a remarkable job! A few of my youngest students and my oldest students give it a try…
Once each child completed their own pattern of musical notes, they then read their pattern by playing their songs on our plastic xylophone cups…
You might be wondering why I didn’t set out real xylophones for the children to play their songs. Well, since you are wondering… We had so many different xylophones at play all at once around the classroom, I decided to let this center to be all about color matching and color patterning rather than sound. We will do more song writing as we continue the school year so this was a good beginning. Â The children loved tapping out their colorful notes on the matching cups and although they didn’t hear the sounds of their notes, they were just as happy demonstrating how they could read their notes by tapping them out on the cups…
Each child shared their colorful songs with me. I really, really enjoyed observing the effort and time the children took to create their colorful songs and was completely thrilled to listen to the children present their songs to me…
We added the children’s songs to our drawing board of the day too!
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