Kazoo

Suggested Grade Level: Preschool-K

Based on: Barney & Friends #709: "Come Blow Your Horn!"

Objectives:
Children are naturally interested in musical instruments because they enjoy rhythms, sounds, parades and circuses. An early exposure to instruments (specifically horns) can enhance a child's knowledge, interest, and appreciation of music.

The children will:

• discover that an instrument is an object used to make music
• learn that practice is the way musicians learn to play
• recognize that a band is made up of musicians working together to play a piece of music (cooperation)

Skills:

• Art
• Music awareness
• Rhythm

Materials:

• Toilet paper tubes (one per child)
• Wax paper
• Rubber bands (one per child)

Directions:
Show children pictures of different kinds of instruments (particularly horns). Discuss the ways they look similar and the ways they look different.

Tell children that today they are going to make their own type of horn called a kazoo.

Give each child one toilet paper tube and a square of wax paper. Help students cover one end of the toilet paper tube with the wax paper and secure it with a rubber band.

Students can hum into the open end. Encourage everyone to work together to play a song as a band.

Extension:
Act out "Little Boy Blue."

Have children sit in a circle with their kazoos and one child in the middle of the circle who will be "Little Boy (or Girl) Blue." When you say "Come blow your horn," invite all students sitting in the circle to blow their horns. Meanwhile, the child in the middle pretends to be asleep.

Recite this rhyme:

"Little boy blue
Come blow your horn
The sheep's in the meadow
The cow's in the corn
Where's the little boy who looks after the sheep?
He's under the haystack fast asleep."

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