Dinosaurs Level: Early Grades - Listening, appraising & movement

High and Low Boomwhackers (pitch)

The bassoon, which the children can hear in the final video on this page, is basically a long tube. The longer the tube, the lower the sound which is why the bassoon is much lower-pitched than a recorder. A fun way to let the children experience this is to buy a pack of boomwhackers. The different sized tubes make different pitched sounds and you really can whack without fear of breaking them! Here are a few of the ways children can use boomwhackers:

• whack them on the floor
• hit the tube in the middle
• hit the end of the tube with a piece of card

The children seemed to have understood high and low pitch when I'd previously asked them in the context of singing but what happened later shows the need for the same concept to be explored in a different way - hence the need for music education to be a 'Spiral Curriculum'.

Notice how the children all thought the longer tube made the higher sound even though they saw me whack the higher-pitched one and the lower-pitched one! They were looking rather than listening and they had already learned that high means 'tall' in a visual context. Once they really listened, they experienced the meaning of higher and lower pitch in sound and I was able to explain that long tubes make lower pitched sounds than short ones. Many children also mistake high and low for volume, as in television controls.

More Boomwhacker sounds:

L'apres-midi d'un Dinosaur by Gordon Jacob (pitch, tempo)

The children can listen to a bassoon in the video below. This music is about what a dinosaur does in the afternoon! The title is in French. It is low-pitched, slow music played on a big woodwind instrument called the bassoon and on the electronic piano. The children walk heavily to the music, like a contented dinosaur. The dinosaur goes to sleep at the end and has sweet dreams.