Hand Drumming: Explore, Play, Create

Funded Dec 3, 2024

Coming back from winter break to then be able to unwrap the gifts of the Donors Choose project, was the most joyful part of the holiday season! The first class to help with the unboxing was a 2nd grade class. Right away we were able to tie into our school expectations of being safe, respectful, and responsible. Some students were so excited about the drums, they asked to take home the card that came inside the box. Right away, we were able to explore what our drums could do: knocking at the door, "hello, who's there?" driving a racecar and honking our horns "beep beep" scratching with our nails, tapping with our fingers. We even explored wearing our drums as hats, eating soup from a bowl, cutting the pizza, and spinning like a wheel with our fingers riding the outside like an acrobat.

This level of play through exploration opened the student's ears and gave us a wide range of sound vocabulary to use with our hand drums in later lessons. Even the anticipation built over the course of the first week. "I can't wait to go to music Thursday, music is my favorite class!" "I saw the drums on my brother's classdojo." A 2nd grader shared "we have drums like this in my culture, and play them when we have parties."

A fourth grade class invented a game where they sat in a circle and each student played a rhythm solo. 2nd grade was able to use their drum sound vocabulary to perform "Queen Queen Caroline" with three sounds of their choice. Kindergarten is currently working through a rain soundscape with their hand drums, with a rainbow scarf surprise hidden under the drum at the end of the thunderstorm. We are so thrilled to have the drums, and look forward to expanding our materials through future Donors Choose opportunities!”

With gratitude,

Ms. Wolf