One of our homemade musical instruments was filling bottles to different depths with coloured water and then striking them to make a xylophone type of sound. When we saw the idea of using glow sticks to add interest to the bottles we thought we’d give that a go too.

Same great sound …

 just a different, fun angle.

We didn’t want to waste the glow sticks so put them to another use – to jazz up some very ordinary balloons for our littlest friend.

and as some funky jewelry for the big fella.

It was interesting trying to blow up the balloons and get the glowsticks in as well!!

The children took them into a darkened room and just loved the slightly spooky experience.

Even with the balloons deflated (as they did overnight), the glow sticks still looked really fascinating!

We came across some great ways of making interest bottles at Preschool Projects and one that we thought we would try is the rain stick, an instrument that is traditionally made from a cactus with its spikes pushed to the inside and some sort of grain such as wheat or small pebbles added to create that rain sound as it falls down past the spikes.

The one that we wanted to try needed to be much easier as we don’t have those cactuses readily available.

We gathered together a plastic bottle, toothpicks and some rice …

filled the bottle with the toothpicks …

and added some rice.

Unfortunately it just sounded like a normal shaker as the toothpicks all lined up and didn’t stay intertwined which meant the rice didn’t have anything to bounce off.

We had heaps of sticks with knobbly bits so decided to try them instead of the toothpicks as we felt they would stay crooked across the bottle.

We broke them up small and added the rice.

We sticky taped the lid on and found that it worked really well.

The only drawback here was that there wasn’t enough length in the container for the rice to have a decent distance to fall so we found a long cardboard tube …

stuck a bottle top in the end …

added longer lengths of stick …

and popped in some rice (not much).

We also stuck together two smaller tubes made of  thinner cardboard…

and decided that that one made the best sound!

Amongst the pile of stuff we had left over from the presentation on Irresistible Ideas for Water which we did at the Yarra Ranges Early Childhood Conference a while back, the glitter was by far the children’s favourite find in the clean up.

Some of it they used, with some of our left over bottles, to make the tornado/vortex tube but looking through our photos they noticed we had been having fun with glitter jars too, like the ones we made last year.

They immediately wanted to give them another go too, so we talked to them about remembering to put glycerine in the water. The glycerine just changes the viscosity of the water enough so that the glitter and ‘bling’ that goes into it moves a little slower through the water, making it look a little like a snow dome.

 So they each filled a bottle with water and a few squirts of the sticky glycerine. We loved the teamwork happening!

They added the bling …

screwed the lids on nice and tight, then taped up the top of the bottles with electrical tape,  just to be sure they didn’t leak.

Then they shook and tipped …

and shook some more – how simple and how fascinating!

When the children are looking for something new to do with paint, we relish the challenge to come up with something a little bit different.

Here we gave the children some clear bottles and squirty paint.

They added squirts of different coloured paints to the insides of the bottles.

Naturally they chose to add several different colours.

Next they rolled and shook and tipped and rolled …

until the paint whizzed all around it.

You don’t want the paint to be too thick or it doesn’t go anywhere. We needed to water ours down a little.

It’s a good idea to pop a bit of tape over the end of the bottle as the children are bound to tip it upside down so the paint can run down the sides!

It is sort of messy play without the mess!

Don’t they look great?

An activity the participants at the Yarra ranges Conference did with us was to blow bubbles, but think outside the square with how they formed them.

We’ve blogged a lot over time, about different implements the children have used to make bubbles, from hands …

to blowers made out of wire …

to using just one one straw …

sometimes double length straws …

and at other times bundles of straws!

For our recent Water Workshop, the participants used bottles with the bottoms cut out which we picked up from Resoursce Rescue.

They created huge bubbles!

Naturally we thought the children might like to give it a go too.

They managed very well … The shape of the bottles was ideal!

We also mentioned to them the bundle of straws our kinder children made last year and they thought they’d like to give that a go as well.

When they were dipping the bendy straws into the bubble mixture they flared out due to the concertina part …

which created a wonderful, random bubbly effect!

The bubbles went off in all directions, to everyone’s surprise - what fun! 

While had some lovely clean, dry, sifted sand left over from a workshop, so we asked the children if they would like to make some musical instruments with it.

We found some pop top bottles and funnels.

They half filled the bottles with sand …

then chose some bright cellophane to pop on the top with an elastic band.

Away they went, dancing to their own tunes!

The sound was quite muted – pretty nice for a change. It would be interesting to hear the difference in sound using a tin or cardboard container. Next time maybe.

A really simple game which the children can make themselves is a homemade version of quoits. We filled up large used drink bottles with coloured water. You could use sand or rice or whatever.

Then we cut out the middle out of two plastic plates, glued them together and added coins to give the quoit a bit more weight.

This a a great game for one or more children. Start up close and move back a step each time you get it over the bottle. See how far back you can be and still get the ring over the bottles.

It whizzes like a frisby through the air with those weights on it!

Success! And we didn’t set this up!

When were scrounging around Resource Rescue this week …

we found some clear plastic concertina tubing that bends around corners really easily.

We thought it would make fabulous tubing for telephones and luckily enough also found some cone shaped bottles as well as some regular shaped opaque ones.

We twisted the clear bottles onto the ends of the tubing and cut out a section on the side so that it could be spoken into like a walkie talkie …

and listened to like a telephone!

Then we added the cone shaped ones to another piece of tubing and cut the bottoms out. We found that the cones were extremely effective in relaying the sound from one person to another …

in fact the children only had to whisper for it to be heard at the other end!

The regular bottles worked fine too, just not quite as good as the cone shape.

It was lovely to be able to stand out of sight, around the corner from each other, and still have a chat!

We have found with the cold, wet weather that the children are not interested in the water wall – we don’t blame them!

We seem to have marbles on our minds at the moment with different activities we have been doing and thought that perhaps we could utilise the water wall in a different way.

It needed a bit of snazzing up as it was looking a bit neglected, so with the children’s help we added a few more bottles and some hoses as well.

Talk about giving the old girl new life!

The children love it and are having lots of fun manipulating the different components …

to make a variety of paths for their marbles.

The beauty of the wall is that come summer the bottles and hoses will be suitable for both marbles and water play!

As you can imagine the children are having a ball playing with their new look wall.

A mar-ball that is!

We are  a part of the  ”Childhood 101 – We Play Link“

We love music – listening, moving and dancing to it, singing along with it, relaxing by it, playing instruments to accompany it, and in particular we love to make our own music.

An instrument we made with the children last year has been in constant use in our music corner and the children never tire of playing with it.

It began as a science experiment when we were talking to the children about the way sound travels through air.  We filled four identical bottle with different levels of water.

The result being, the more water the bottle contained, the less air it held and the deeper the sound it resonated, less water in the bottle means more air, resulting in a higher pitch being produced. We use a wooden drumstick to tap out the different sounds.

The children commented on how similar the sounds of the musical bottles are to the sounds made by our very popular  marimba, a wonderful instrument Sherry’s Uncle Bill made for his grandchildren some years ago and has (fortunately) made its way to us at kinder!

Some children found it quite difficult to determine which bottles created the higher and deeper pitches but older children might be better able to distinguish the difference and line them up from deepest pitch to highest.

Due to its constant use we have had to replace the liquid in the bottles over time and using different coloured water simply adds a new dimension to a favourite instrument.

We like to provide the children with a selection of bottles, glasses or jars, a tub of water and a funnel, and allow them to make their own music by filling the containers with as much or as little water as they want. The more containers they have the greater the variety of pitch they can create.

Simple science is music to the ears!