Sound Travels #3 - How does music make us feel?

When the children were playing the sound guessing game, Sebastien suddenly took off his headset and said, "I'm scared." This started our exploration of how music makes us feel.
We listened to two pieces of music. One is from a collection of halloween music and the other "My First Minuet" from Baby Mozart.

It was interesting to see the children's reflections and comparisons after listening to the two pieces of music. Most children from the group thought the halloween song to be scary but Nate liked the music. He thinks it is funny. Most children found "My First Minuet" to be calming. Jack said, "It reminds me of a person dreaming."
Then the children painted while listening to the music. Afterwards, they were asked to describe their feelings and what they have painted.

Sound Travels 2- Activities with SeJung

SeJung, our practicum student explored cooking sounds with the children. She played three sound clips (a bacon sizzling in the pan, a blender blending, and someone chopping) on the computer and asked the children to guess. There were guesses like planes, thunderstorm, rocks falling and bikes. They were all quite surprised when the real answers were revealed to them. After the guessing game, SeJung recreated the cooking sounds with the children by making a traditional Korean pancake with them.

Sound Travels 1 - Form of sound

Strumming the elastic bands.

What is sound like? The children explored the concept of the form(recognizable features which can be observed, identified, described and categorized) of sound.

How would sound 'look' like from a xylophone?

The children found the answer to the question through experiments and by watching a video clip. First, the children stretched out an elastic band on their fingers and tried to pluck it. They heard a sound and saw the elastic bands vibrate on their fingers. Next, we wanted to see what would happen if we stop the vibrations. We played a key on the xylophone and immediately put a finger on that key. The children noticed that the sound stopped when the vibration stopped. Together, we concluded that sound is vibration.

Sound waves from a tamborine.

Observing sound waves from their voices.

To further their understanding of sound, we watched a video called Sounds from Brainpop Jr. and the children learned that vibrations can create sound waves. Orin asked, "Is it like waves in the ocean?" I explained to the children that we can't see sound waves but we can hear it. To help the children "see" sounds, we used an App called Wavepad on ipad. They were intrigued when their voices turned into waves on the screen. They noticed that if they talked loudly, their wave length would look bigger and if they talked gently, it would look smaller.