. Better yet, students of all ages love Boomwhackers. If you have not yet had the joy of seeing or playing them, I will describe briefly. Each Boomwhacker is a colored plastic tube cut to a specific length. This allows them to be pitched, and each tube is marked with the pitch it plays, as well as the solfege syllable associated with it (assuming you are using fixed do). They come in various sets, though the most common set is the standard one-octave diatonic set in C Major.There are tons of Boomwhacker resources available, some free, some surprisingly expensive. The neat thing about them though is that you do not need any extra materials. The tubes can be used with many resources you already have. Sometimes the best thing to do is to provide no resources and just let the kids explore!
Granted, there is always a need to establish procedures and expectations (Boomwhackers must be held like.... Boomwhackers may not touch your neighbor/other items in the room/small animals... Do not treat them like you are performing martial arts... etc.) but within reason they are tough enough to stand up to class after class of use.
One of my favorite things to do is to show how one person can play an entire song with a set, and then how we can play the same song as a class with each person responsible for one note. I usually do this with simple songs like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star or Mary Had a Little Lamb. Kids can get pretty excited over a discovery that they can all be part of making the music together (though a few get disgruntled - "Why does red get all of the notes? I'm playing pink and I only got to play once!" I'm fairly certain these kids will never be happy with what I give them, so I just try to make sure no one kid is stuck with one color all the time).
A while back I created a Powerpoint to help introduce my students to the Boomwhackers. The goal was to establish my own procedures as well as get them comfortable with using the tubes properly, waiting their turn, following the directions for when to play, etc. You can find that Powerpoint in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
This school year, I decided I would take that idea one step further. I created a Powerpoint for Mary Had a Little Lamb using the same process - one color per slide, advance through the slides steadily to get the kids to play the tubes in the right order. This led to a realization of a problem. Even if I am advancing the slides to a steady beat, there was no cue to get the kids to play on the beat. I had to go through it a lot to get to a point where they knew what came next in order to have some semblance of beat.
This just wouldn't do.
Instead, I created a system of "notation" that uses colored squares and rectangles to indicate which tube plays and for how long. It allows the kids to look ahead at what's coming, and seems to do a great job of prepping them to move into regular notation. It also has the side benefit of not being a cutesy picture of some clipart bumblebee and heart and sun in place of real notes. I am not a fan of those. I created a song collection using this method of progressively arranged tunes. You can find that collection here. It includes the songs Hot Cross Buns, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Clair de Lune, Go Tell Aunt Rhody, Frere Jacques, London Bridge, and Old MacDonald. Each song takes up one slide, and is readily approachable by even the youngest of elementary students.
My goal is to create a series of song collections, and then offer them all bundled together at a discount.
If you have another way of using Boomwhackers please feel free to leave a comment. Even better would be if you use my Powerpoints let me know how you used them and how it went!
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