We are a household of music lovers. We love to listen to music mostly, but Ghostwriterdaddy is a bit of a muso in real life too. He’s been in numerous bands and used to DJ when he owned his own record shop. As a result, our play room has one wall that is lined with hundreds of vinyls and there are instruments throughout the house, both of the adult and child variations. And me? I am not musical. I’ve been described as tone deaf actually, but that doesn’t stop me helping to nurture the kids in music play. The preschooler has always loved my teaching CDs (he calls it singing and dancing) and quite often we pop one on for a little singing session. I wanted to extend these sessions a little though, so we decided to make our own musical instruments. This is what we did.

We used:

• rainbow rice and pasta mix
• tin foil trays with lids
• an empty coffee jar with lid
• spoons, bowls and jugs to pour and scoop
• the tuff spot

The kids love playing with rainbow rice; it’s a lovely sensory play material and one of the best things about it is the sounds that it makes as you transfer it from container to container. It was the preschooler that noticed the rice sounded like rain (we have in the past made a rain stick with rice, tin foil and an empty Pringles tube- but that’s another post!) and he started to experiment with different containers.

He spent a while separating the rice from the pasta and noted that the sounds were different. I took the opportunity to talk about pitch and we noted that the larger pieces of pasta made a low sound, while the rice made a high sound when we dropped them into plastic cups. Then we made our own instruments:

• We filled one foil tray with lots of rice and pasta and popped a lid on top.
• We filled one foil tray with less than half the amount of pasta and popped a lid on top.
• We filled an empty coffee jar with some rice and pasta and crewed the lid on tight.

We talked about which tray had more and which had less and we made predictions about what sounds they would make. The preschooler was sure that the tray with the least amount of rice would make a high sound- and he was right!

We then talked about the ways in which we could use our instruments to make sounds. We came up with three actions:

• pat
• shake
• roll

The preschooler was able to tell me the initial sounds for each of the words and when I had written them down onto sticky labels I asked him to choose which one went on which instrument. He decided that the trays should be ‘pat’ and ‘shake’ and the jar should be ‘roll’. Clever boy! We then spent some time sounding out and reading the words and I wrote them on the chalkboard too so that the preschooler could trace over them with his finger tips.

The preschooler enjoyed learning basic musical vocabulary and I was pleased to get a little reading practise in too. Later on, we made a huge star shape from the rest of our rainbow rice and I invited the children to combine their instruments with sensory play. The preschooler took great pleasure in reading the labels to his sister and helping her use the instruments correctly. I also heard him tell her about the different sounds the instruments made and they had a little jamming session!

We loved this simple activity and I think that allowing children to make their own instruments is a fantastic way to explore lots of musical concepts. We looked at ways to use instruments and specifically pitch; to extend the activity we could also talk about using the instruments to compose tunes and for making longer and shorter sounds too. Music is such an important element of our every day lives and seeing the children’s play light up with sounds that they have created is wonderful! As the quote quite rightly insists: music is what feelings sound like and I couldn’t have put it any better myself.

You can read more super ideas for learning through play at Susanne’s blog Ghostwritermummy

This week we have been playing with a rather fantastic construction site that William very cutely calls an ‘instruction’ site.

We have created a messy construction site before but we wanted to do it again as we have some rather fabulous new wooden vehicles from DKL Toys Wonderworld.

Esther and William have a front loader each and a dumper truck each. A large truck and a small crane to share.

These fabulous wooden vehicles are affectionately known in our house as ‘The Pack’ a name shamelessly stolen from Thomas. We also have Cranky the Crane working on the site.

The site is made in our Tuff Spot and we also used the mega ramp this time as an exciting way for vehicles and materials to access the site.

We marked out the site with cones and William donned his hard hat and safety jacket.

The materials we chose for the site were shreddies, oats, rice and cannelloni rolls as large drains. There is a building site opposite Esther and William’s preschool and we have sat and watched the drainage being moved by the trucks and cranes. Esther and William had great fun recreating the jobs we had seen the site crew carry out near their school.

I love the way that play like this encourages children to use language that they would not ordinarily have chance to use. Esther and William were stacking, scooping, digging, loading, scraping, transporting, constructing. They were giving each other instructions and directions, they described and narrated what they were doing and they asked questions. Lots of questions! Which is great, it is how children learn. Why are we doing this, how does this work, can I add this, can we try this, can you please do this? Questions, questions, questions!

Esther and William love messy play. I think that they find it therapeutic. It also encourages them to play differently, it provides problems to solve that means they can be creative in their thinking and their play. William loves testing things and spends lots of time testing things to see whether they are magnetic or not, using Cranky the Crane. Esther is more of a storyteller, a creator of characters. Their different styles complement each other beautifully as they play.

As the day moves on more and more toys enter the world of our messy play. Engines are usually the first to appear often followed by cars, fairies, pirates and dinosaurs. The mega ramp added a new element of play, an extra level to their storytelling. By the end of the day the construction site had morphed into this mish mash of play!

This morning while Esther and William were at school I changed the play from construction site to dinosaur park and this will be used tomorrow to explore flooding as the mega ramp becomes a waterfall and the dino park floods. I cannot wait to see how they interpret the play.

This post is the start of this week’s Messy Play for Matilda Mae, I hope you will link up and join us.

Today we enjoyed some wonderful messy, sensory play.

We created a construction site for our Wonderworld wooden vehicles.

While Esther was having a funny five minutes (as toddlers often do) I spent some lovely one to one time with William.

We combined two of his favourite things, letters and trains.

William knows the alphabet, he can order letters and he knows their names and also their sounds.

He can use his knowledge of sounds to read and spell CVC words.

He can also, with help, work out longer words and loves spelling out the names of his favourite Thomas engines.

Today we used Plan Toys Alphabet Blocks in the Tuff Spot to do just that.

Together we took the letter tiles from the box and put them in the Tuff Spot. Some we had letter side up and some were showing their corresponding picture.

William decided he would like to make words with the letters, specifically the names of his best Thomas characters, starting, of course, with Thomas.

Rather than me spell out the name using letter names or sounds William decided that he would read the name from one of his posters on the wall.

He went back to check each letter as he built the word.

After Thomas William wanted to make Percy which I helped him with by telling him the sounds and names of the letters. C making the s sound is still a bit confusing for my three year old boy. When he had made the word he knew it was right but wanted to check so ran off to get one of his many Thomas stories to match his word, Percy, to the name printed in the book.

After this William concentrated for a while on the engines already in the Tuff Spot who have their name printed on the bottom of them. All by himself he found the letters and made several engine names including Toby, Mavis, Dart and Den.

We talked a lot about initial sounds and labelled some of the toys in the Tuff Spot with their first letter. L for lorry, t for train. William really enjoyed doing this and he loved finding the letters by their picture as well as by identifying the letter.

Because one of William’s favourite trains is called Charlie we talked about the digraph ‘ch’. William already knows this sound as we have Cheerios for breakfast. He also knows how to distinguish curly c and kicking k because of the cereal name and the brand name, Kelloggs.

William is a sponge at the moment, soaking up knowledge of letters, sounds, order of planets, counting in 10s. He just loves learning and activities like this where learning is firmly founded in play are perfect.

Esther is a much quieter soul and probably knows almost as much but is not as enthusiastic about it. She likes cuddles and her dolls house and more intimate small world play.

But when she came to join in the play she loved finding hidden letters among the messy materials in the Tuff Spot.

We had a lovely game finding all 26 letters when it was time to put them back in the box.

The alphabet blocks from Plan Toys are really beautifully made. The pictures are simple and the colours are striking.

You can buy the letter blocks from The Toadstool for £18.50 and I think they are well worth the money for providing lots of creative ways of playing with the alphabet, learning letter names and sounds, learning to read and spell and to encourage a love of learning, and especially learning through play.

You will be able to read more about our Letter Land Construction Site in this week’s Messy Play for Matilda Mae.

We were given one set of the Plan Toy Letter Blocks for the purpose of this review (Toad Test).