Homemade Musical Instruments

Water bottles or small pop bottles can be filled with rocks or beans to make wonderful shakers. Different size bottles can be saved to fit different size hands. If you are feeling really creative, you can add colored beads or buttons to make the shaking bottle pretty as well. Once you have filled the bottle, use superglue or some other strong adhesive so the small objects will not come out. These instruments make great homemade shakers to shake along with songs or recordings.

Drums are everywhere! Turn over a tin pan, a wooden bowl or a Tupperware container and listen to the different sounds they make. You can use chop sticks, pencils or spoons to pound on the instruments.

Paper towel or toilet tubes make wonderful sounds when you blow through them. See if different size tubes make different sounds.

Metal and plastic spoons rattle together when you shake them. Measuring cups can be banged together to make a cymbal.

Songs Young Children Love

Children love to sing with their parents and their siblings and they are never critical of the quality of your singing. Many of the simple songs children love best include repetition and can be enhanced with hand and finger actions. These songs will keep children entertained for hours and they will sing them with you over and over again without getting bored. A great way to enhance the song as your child gets more familiar and a little older is to add your own verses to the song. The traditional Row Your Boat can become Sail Your Boat, etc.

Row Row Row Your Boat
(Great to do rowing with partner
sitting facing each other on floor.)

Row, row, row, your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

I’m a little Teapot
(Put one hand on hip when you say
handle and the other in the air
for the spout)

I'm a little teapot
Short and stout.
Here is my handle
Here is my spout.
When I get all steamed up
Hear me shout.
Tip me over and pour me out

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
(Opening and shutting hands while you
sing can represent stars.)

Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are?
Up above the world so high...
Like a diamond in the sky...
Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are?

Ring Around the Rosie
(Children love to go around in a circle
and fall down with the words.)

Ring around the rosie
Pocket full of posies
Ashes, Ashes
We all fall down!