Sound and hearing

We are learning all about our senses.

We see with our eyes, hear with our ears, taste with our tongues, smell with our noses and touch with our hands.

This month we are especially focusing on sound and hearing.

Teacher asked us to make as many different noises with our bodies as we could.

We tried slapping, clapping, humming, talking, scratching, clicking, sniffing, stamping and whistling.

We were amazed at how many different kinds of noises we could make.

We played a sound game.

Teacher had made 6 sound boxes.  We rattled each one in turn and then had to guess what was in each box.  After we had guessed teacher got out the sound cards and we had to match each sound card with the sound box.  We really loved checking whether we were correct or not (we were, each time, yay!)

We had a look at our box of musical instruments.

We classified these musical instruments into

musical instruments that make noise when you beat them and

musical instruments that make noise when you shake them (notice that the tambourine is in both groups!)

We had no musical instruments in class that make sounds when you blow them like whistles, trumpets, flutes and tin whistles, but we talked about all of these, along with instruments that have strings to make music (guitars, violins, double bass, harps).

After arranging elastic bands in order of size we noticed that small elastics make very high sounds while big elastics make very low sounds.

Teacher showed us how to make straw whistles.  She started with a long straw which made a low sound and then she cut a little of the straw off each time.  As the straw got shorter, the note got higher.  We really enjoyed playing our straw whistles (though they took a lot of practice at first!)

We really enjoyed learning more about sound with Tigtag videos

http://www.tigtagworld.com/

with concept cartoons http://conceptcartoons.com/science.html

and with EDpaX science http://www.memory4teachers.co.uk/channels/presentations/edpax/science.html