Making Materials: Music Manipulatives

Our Little Musician program teaches colour-coded notes, so I decided to make him some colour-coded notes and a staff to put them on!

I bought some mounting boards (I wanted something sturdy and cheap for the staff) and wooden disks for the notes. I was intending to string several boards together to make a super-long staff, but unfortunately, I was picturing the disks in inches and not centimetres  so they are a lot smaller than I intended and will soon be replaced by nice big ones!

For the smaller notes, I used just the one board to make a mini-staff. I simply drew on lines around an inch apart (the width of my ruler). The space between the upper and lower staff has a faint smudge where I turned the ruler over to double the gap, but this works as a nice subtle reminder of where to put middle C.

The notes are simply painted wooden disks.

do = red   re=orange  mi=yellow  fa=green  so=blue  la=purple  ti=pink

I also made some chord cubes. These can either be placed on the staff or stacked to make the chords we are learning (in the picture there is do-mi-so, fa-la-do and so-ti-re). I had ten blocks, so seven are one colour and the rest have a different colour on each face.

Staff with moveable notes and chord cubes

Linking to Montessori Mondays

Tactile Numeral Board

This is a little project that I've been planning about 12 months now... I know I said that I am moving on to Montessori, but I like the idea of combining the quantity within the numeral and will continue to do so alongside the 'traditional' maths presentations.

This board is really a piece of polystyrene wrapped in felt - the glue I have was reluctant to work with polystyrene, so I ended up stitching it together...

The numbers are cut out of felt and glued on - I made sure that the background colours will match up for the Montessori number rods that I am making. Each numeral has holes into the polystyrene into which  Nikki can put golf tees. This goes together with the JG maths flashcards we have been using.

Then Nikki gets the fun job of counting out and balancing marbles (or anything remotely small and round - in this case miniature apples) onto all the golf tees!

The other side will have the numbers 5-9, but I will leave them off until he has mastered 0-4.

Linking up to Montessori Mondays

Making Materials - Red Rods

I decided that red rods should be easy enough to make myself. Since the emphasis of this material is length, I really don't think that the size or shape of the rod is too important. The 'official' rods are 2.5cm square, but it was a whole lot easier (and cheaper) for me to use 1.2cm dowelling.

I started by cutting the 10cm and 20cm rods, and then made my measurements by placing the 10cm rod on alongside the longest-cut rod until I had cut all ten rods. Using this method, I could ensure that when we came to using the smallest rod as a comparison of the length-difference between adjacent rods, that it would make them both the same. This is more important for the work than 100% precise lengths. Overall, I gained around 2mm for each rod, which I think isn't bad considering that the cuts were not perfectly straight (and thus the dowels don't fit together with perfectly flat edges) and all the tools I had were a 30cm ruler, a tape measure, a hacksaw and a pencil!

Once the rods were cut, I sanded them down (using scraps left over from the sandpaper letters) and rounded off the edges.

Then I painted them with red acrylic.

Finally, I finished them off and sealed the paint with a coat of home made beeswax polish.

Now I just need to make something to store them in!

Making Materials - Sandpaper Letters

I've been studying the Montessori method in a lot more detail lately, and have found that in learning why the materials are made in the way they are, and how they work has made me really really want them all!

Unfortunately, I can't quite stretch to the £3000 for the complete nursery package. I did break down and buy a few things on ebay (mostly over half-price) like the knobbed cylinders and some number beads which worked out as too difficult and too expensive to make myself. I have been busy making other things, though!

I have completed a set of lower-case sandpaper letters. I chose a cursive script as the letters are used train the hand movements for writing and I don't think that waiting to teach cursive helps with handwriting skills at all, as this forces the child to re-learn a skill they thought they had already mastered.

I used this template for the letters, but reduced the joining tails considerably - if you watch this video, the instructor says to remove the tails completely, but I had already made my letter by the time I saw it and wasn't about to start again!

First I cut out the template letters and stuck them upside-down on the back of my sandpaper.

Template mounted ready for cutting.

Then I cut out the letters. I used a craft knife for the holes, but found that it was easier to cut out the letter shapes with scissors.

Sandpaper letters waiting to be mounted.

Finally, I mounted them on card. I didn't have any blue or pink, and was too lazy to paint them, so all the letters are on white. I may re-mount them at a later date, or add a blue/pink border, but I'm happy with them for now.

Finished sandpaper letters.

Linking up to Montessori Mondays