My daughter loves making noise and she is fascinated by musical instruments. When I saw a Toob of musical instruments, I knew she’d love to play with them.
Using the toob toys, I made an instruments busy bag. It’s not a noisy one, such as you would expect. Rather, it is a quiet busy bag that requires my child's imagination to make the music. There is a time and a place for the noisy instruments, but today’s busy bag includes matching small, model instruments to instrument cards.
The printable gives my daughter cards with some images of children playing the instrument (when available) or just an image of the instrument (for others). There are eight model instruments in the Toob, so those are the ones I printed. I made cards with other instruments, however. You might want to use this if you have different pretend instruments. Or, maybe you want to make a matching game.
She loves to pretend to play instruments so I also printed a page with a keyboard on it. I may make some larger model instruments too at some point. (She loves to pretend to play the violin.) I wanted this to be a fairly compact busy bag so we could carry it to gymnastics to keep busy while big brother is playing.
To round out the busy bag, I put the book Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin! by Lloyd Moss in it as well. This is a fun book about a small group of instruments. It has a counting element to it too, and it is a fun book to read aloud. It’s almost melodic!
I love pairing busy bags with picture books. Here are some suggestions for an even more complete instruments experience. Some of these come with accompanying CDs with great orchestral music. Many of these would be best for a unit study with an older child, but my younger can always join in.
Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin by Lloyd Moss provides an overview of orchestra instruments as various musicians get ready for their concert. I love the onomonopia!
The Story of the Orchestra by Robert Levine has a CD (or online link for newer editions) to listen to various instruments.
The Story of the Incredible Orchestra by Robert Koscielniak is an entertaining history of the various instruments in the orchestra from the 1600s until today.
Peter and the Wolf by Janet Schulman. This is a narrated version of the classic musical piece. Each animal is represented by a different instrument, so the story is told through the music as well as the modernize words.
Listen to the Birds: An Introduction to Classical Music by Ana Gerhard. This comes with a nice CD of some classical favorites.
The Carnival of the Animals by Jack Prelutsky. The musical masterpiece of this title introduces various instruments by assigning each one an animal. The former children’s poet laureate writes some fun verses to go with the music.
Our instruments busy bag is not like handing her a bag of noisy instruments. I guess I could say this is a quieter version. However, I know that this is simply a stepping stone to letting my daughter make her own music. I’ll expect her to make plenty of noise as she plays with the plastic instruments. It’s a key to imagination for her, and so far, she enjoys it.
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This post is a part of the A-Z Busy Bag Blog Hop! Click over to see more.
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