As part of the Year 4 Science topic ‘Sound’, the pupils have been designing musical instruments from junk. Initially, the pupils designed their musical instrument thinking about how it could change in pitch and the type of instrument that they wanted – blow, bang, pluck, scrape.
Once each child had a design, they went home to find the component parts for their instrument and then in the next Science lesson, they made them. As you can see from the pictures, they really enjoyed making the musical instruments. Once the instruments were complete, they tried them to see if they worked and evaluated how well they worked, thinking about the change in pitch that they could create. Some were really good and made some interestingly pitched sounds, whilst others collapsed due to excess tension. However, everyone learned about how to change pitch through width and length of strings or through size of beans in a shaker.
