Thursday, February 20, 2014

Rainbow Drums on the Light Table

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We store all of our colored glass stones for our light table in clear paint cans that I found at the dollar store. More specifically, we have a clear paint can for each color of glass stones that we own. So there's one filled with red, one with orange, one with different shades of green, etc. The entire rainbow and more.

One particular evening, one of the clear paint cans was lying empty on the floor. K picked it up and started banging on it like a drum. That's when the rainbow drums were created!

Rainbow drums on the light table from And Next Comes L

I took all of our paint cans filled with glass stones, ensuring that the lids were on tight, and put them on the light table upside down. I decided to put them upside down because then the surface of the drum would be slightly bigger and not indented. I also didn't want to risk having the boys dent the lids so that I couldn't open the paint cans afterwards. I arranged them in a rainbow order and set out some wooden spoons. The rainbow drums looked so magical!

Closeup of rainbow drums on the light table from And Next Comes L

You'll notice that the number of glass stones varies from paint can to paint can. That's the science part of this activity. The sound of the drums varied depending on how many glass stones were in the container so each paint can ended up having a slightly different tone.

To set the mood for some music fun, I put on J's favorite song, which at the time was "Eraser" from the Barenaked Ladies' Snacktime album. This particular song has various tempo changes in it, so it was a lot of fun to watch J match his drumming to the tempo of the song.