Looking for more ways to get your students involved in music and to prepare them for their BSO concert experience? Here are some simple activities that you can do with your students (or at home!) to get everyone in a "musical" state of mind.

Mystery Sounds

Collect six plastic film containers and fill them with materials that will make a sound when you shake the container. Use materials that will produce distinctly different sounds, such as un-popped popcorn kernels, salt, or sesame seeds. Here are a variety of ways to use the containers to help students develop good listening skills:

1. Fill containers with different materials. Have the students create a list of adjectives that describe the sounds (e.g., "swish," "hard," "gentle").
2. Fill six containers, creating three pairs of "matched" sounds (e.g., put popcorn in two containers, salt in two containers and sesame seeds in two containers). Place the containers in random order. Have the students match the containers that have identical sounds.
3. Have students arrange the containers in a soft to loud sequence.
4. Collect enough film containers for each student to create their own musical shaker by choosing their own "mystery" materials. Have the class use their shakers to keep the beat while singing a familiar song or listening to a recorded example.

Kitchen Sounds

Ask the students to bring an interesting "kitchen sound" in a paper bag so that others won't be able to see it. Have students stand in back of the class and "play" their sound. The others are to guess what object made the sound. If they are unable to guess, ask students to describe the sound using a variety of adjectives.

After several performances and guesses, have the students group the kitchen sounds they have heard by various categories, for example loud sounds, wood sounds, metal sounds, whirring sounds. Once they have categorized and described the sounds, create Venn diagrams comparing and contrasting two of the categories.

Human Acoustics

Bring in a clean oven rack (or wire cookie cooling rack)and attach an 18" length of string to each of two corners. Have one student wind enough string around each index finger to be able to suspend the oven rack. This student should then put the index fingers in his/her ears and lean forward so the rack hangs freely without touching anything.

A second student should tap the rack in different places with a metal object (a spoon works well), experimenting with short taps and long, swishing sounds. The observers will hear something entirely different than the student who is holding the rack! As they take turns, have the students speculate as to why it sounds so different to the person holding the rack.

Playing with Glasses

Have students fill three water glasses or bottles to produce the first three sounds of "Hot Cross Buns."

1. Have the students take turns tapping the glasses to play "Hot Cross Buns."
2. Ask the students to see if they can play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" using the same glasses (no-they will need a fourth glass). Have them figure out whether the fourth glass will need to produce a lower or higher sound (higher), then tune the fourth glass and play the entire song.
3. Make up original songs using these four sounds.
4. Notate these songs by using dots to represent each pitch (the higher the dot, the higher the pitch).
5. Add other glasses to produce the entire scale.
6. Play familiar songs using this expanded range.