Water xylophone

Rowan — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:21:53 +0000

If your kid is musical, why not take an invention idea that relates to music. It doesn’t take much effort, and soon your kid will have invented his or her own water xylophone! Afterwards, you kid will be inventing new melodies on the instrument, which is a great way to impress the teacher, as well as encouraging your child to become a budding musician or composer.

All you need is a few glasses of exactly the same shape and size. I would recommend 5-10 glasses. Now fill each of the glasses with different levels of water. This will determine the resulting pitch of the glass when it is struck. There will be a lot of trial and error here, but get your kid to take a spoon and tap each glass to determine its pitch. Add or take out water where necessary, until you have a nice range of pitches. It’s that simple, your kid now has invented an instrument. For visual purposes, you may want to take food coloring and use different colors for different pitches.

Now is the composing part. Your kid can start off with a simple tune like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Happy Birthday, or Mary Had a Little Lamb. Once he or she has figured out that tune, he or she can move on to composing an original one. What’s cool about the color coding is that you can get a piece of paper or cardboard and record in colors the melody of the tune. So when you present this idea, you can include the composition with it. Be careful when transporting this or redoing the experiment at school: if you don’t replicate the water levels exactly, the pitch will change! So make sure your kid prepares this at school or marks the water levels of each glass so that the water xylophone can be replicated.

Create a new instrument

Rowan — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:22:29 +0000

Where does your love of music come from (assuming you have one!)? Your childhood. Let’s go further – ask a musician how it all began and they’ll tell you: there was an old piano at my aunt’s house when I was a kid…and such stories. Most of our talents and abilities begin when we are children. When we did something for the first time, like play the piano, no-one really taught us what to do. We just tinkered on the keys and became amazed at the sounds that we created. We felt empowered by the sounds, because they were completely at our mercy and control (even if our aunt’s piano was out of tune). And a love for music is something that can be carried with you for the rest of your life. So if you can inspire kids about instruments and the music they create, you will have instilled a lifelong means of enjoyment and entertainment.

So that brings us to an invention idea for kids: get your kids to invent a new instrument. You will be amazed at their resourcefulness in pulling this off. There’s two approaches here. The one is for you to give them completely free reign to go out and find objects and things from which to create an instrument. The other is to provide them with a bunch of objects: sticks, stones, paper, cups, sugar and salt shakers, pepper grinders, you name it. Either way will work. If you have a playground or garden, tell them to go outside and find things that make interesting sounds (if they take you very literally they may start bringing frogs back – so beware!). They can even invent instruments out of their voices by making sounds.

If you have a group of kids, you can form a mini-band with all the instruments they have created. Make sure that everyone gets a chance to perform, even if the resulting sounds seems a bit cacophonous.

This idea teaches creativity and imagination, makes instruments and music seem really fun, and is very easy to do!

Kids Invention Ideas » music

Water xylophone

Create a new instrument