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Top freebie!
All Available Free Products
All of the links below link to FREE downloadable products (mostly through Teachers Pay Teachers) that you can use in your music classrooms!
Here’s a really quick way to make some easy, durable, and cheap music note manipulatives. I used craft foam sheets – you can find multicolor packs in most craft aisles or here’s an Amazon Affiliate Link to some to order!
I cut out note shapes out of the foam using the colors as close to Boomwhackers as I could. I only used note heads as my goal for this activity was a VERY basic intro to composition and learning to read lines from left to right. There was no need for stems or flags as I’m not focusing on rhythm concepts at this time. We will do our best to play our songs with a steady beat, however! The notes don’t need to be perfect, and as you can see, mine are a bit rough – but they do the job!
Personally I prefer the foam cut outs because they are more durable, unless you laminate the printed version.
But if you do download this free product, do me a favor and leave us a review on our store if you found it useful!!
Music Note Activities for Early Learners
I use these with my own 3 year old toddlers to do some very basic composition and note reading activities. We take turns picking what color comes next, typically they want to just put them in rainbow order 🤣. Again, my goal for this activity was a VERY basic intro to composition and learning to read lines from left to right. I have varying degrees of success with my three year olds, but I don’t expect a ton from them at this age. This activity can work well for pre-school, kindergarten, and even the first few years of grade school!
Another activity I do with my toddlers is to “write out” a melody they know. So I’ll place the notes in the order of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, then play it for them and work on melody recognition.
Other good songs to do: Row Row Row Your Boat, Mary Had a Little Lamb, This Old Man, etc.!
Thanks for reading!
I hope this can be useful in some way to you in your classroom or with your own children! I’m hoping to do some more activities like these in the coming months so if you liked this be sure to follow us on our socials (top and bottom of page) to stay updated. Thanks!!
Okay – first of all, if you’ve never heard of Chrome Music Lab – you need to check it out! It has tons of FREE tools that are great to use for various things in your classroom, even if it’s just for a “fun” day.
Here is one SUPER fun activity that you can do with just about any grade.
Song Maker in Chrome Music Lab
Possibly my favorite tool in Chrome Music Lab is the Song Maker. My class and I were exploring the tools of the lab and we discovered that the colors used in Song Maker match the colors of the Boomwhackers! So we decided – let’s make a song and PLAY it! We started out with something simple (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star)
As it plays back it gives you a bar to follow along, just pass out Boomwhackers and push play – so easy! All you need is a projector and Boomwhackers! Then I had students start calling out “requests”. I told them it had to be simple – but through doing this I ended up discovering you can change the time signature, length of the song, and a bunch more!
Adjust Song Maker Settings
If you click on settings in the bottom right corner:
It brings up this window which lets you adjust the length of the song, beats per bar, beat division, scale, starting pitch, and range displayed.
Download Premade Song Cards with Direct Links to Pre-Made Songs
I went ahead and created some song cards with links that will load Song Maker with the following songs ready to play:
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
BINGO
Baa Baa Black Sheep
Frere Jacques
Old MacDonald
Jingle Bells
Pop Goes the Weasel
Row Row Row Your Boat
Clementine
Mulberry Bush
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Next Step
After I made some of their requests, I had students come up and create songs at the screen. They had TOO much fun doing this – of course some tried to recreate their favorite song we’d just played, some just filled in ALL the boxes so it was PURE chaos, and some tried to write a fun melody. It was truly great to see them enjoying writing and discovering music as a class!
What Grade Levels?
I found that this activity works well for a VAST age range. I was genuinely surprised by how much fun my middle school students had doing this activity. We don’t do a ton of instrument playing at that age so they found it to be fun to work together as a class and play the song. I had my 2nd graders give it a go – and they did well also! My kindergartners enjoyed figuring out the songs, and we played songs VERY slowly. I still think they had fun and it was a valuable teaching experience but it was definitely harder for them. Keep that in mind for your classroom!
That’s all for today! Thanks for reading and I hope you have fun with this activity!
