Chinese traditional instruments - Video

Play an Animal (dynamics, timbre, tempo, pitch)

This is a music Corner activity for small groups. First put out a selection of instruments, enough for one each. You may have some that are a bit like Chinese ones – you can check here:

Include chime bars C, D, E, G and A too. This is one of the many sets of five notes that form a pentatonic scale. The pentatonic has a definite Chinese sound and the great thing about a pentatonic set of notes is that they all sound good when played at the same time!

Allow the children to explore each instrument, encouraging them to use their own words to describe the sounds, while also supplying some words of your own based on the elements of music.

Next, ask the children to make up music about this year's Chinese Zodiac animal. For the Year of the Pig, they may find an instrument to play slowly or one that can go grunt, grunt. The Year of the Horse sounds might move fast, or go clip, clop. Even if the sound doesn't seem to relate to the right animal, the child will still be making some kind of connection that you can talk about together. Children generally find it easy to believe that an instrument can 'be' an animal, either making the sound or representing the movement.