Exploratorium
Vocal Visualizer
Make sound visible with an activity that provides directions for how to build a vocal visualizer meant to create light patterns. Making noise into the visualizer causes a mirror to vibrate, reflecting a laser beam, and creating the...
Curated OER
Sound and Frequency
Pupils pose their hypothesis, they ready their instruments, then record their observations. This is the science of sound lesson. They move through 5 stations, each focused on a different element of aspect of sound. Check this lesson out,...
Curated OER
What is Sound?
Second graders discuss sound and describe them. For this investigative lesson students observe sound through their eyes, bodies and ears.
Curated OER
Finding Your Big Voice
Young scholars use their diaphragm to create vocal vibrations, vocal sounds, and project sounds through an open space. In this sounds lesson plan, students learn how to use their voices to project through an auditorium.
Curated OER
The Phenomenon of Sound: Waves
Students explore sound waves. In this sound waves activity, students brainstorm different sounds and how sounds move or travel. Students then create a KWL chart and work through six different lab activities to examine how sound waves...
Curated OER
Phonetics: The Study of Speech Sounds
A beginning study of linguistics will include phonetics and the way sound is made. Show your class these great slides with pictures and examples of consonants, vowels, and blends. Placement of the tongue, lips, etc. are displayed to give...
Curated OER
The Icky Sticky Frog
Learners practice the strategy of phoneme awareness in order to identify phonemes with vocal gestures in spoken words. They blend letters and sounds together utilizing the phoneme /i/ by symbol and letter representation and listen as the...
Curated OER
A Whale of a Story
Does sound travel faster in water or in the air? Put the question to the test with a science experiment. After reviewing a table of data, third and fourth graders decide which statements are true and which ones are false. The bottom of...
Curated OER
What is a Sound?
Second graders explore the concept of sound. For this sound lesson, 2nd graders discover what sound, vibrations, and pitch are through several experiments. Students watch a Power Point presentation that allows them to complete a graphic...
Curated OER
The Physics of Sound: How We Produce Sounds
Students are introduced to how they produce sounds. In groups, they participate in experiments in which they measure sound and identify their five senses. Individually, they make their own musical instruments using different objects and...
Star Wars in the Classroom
"Shakespeare and Star Wars": Lesson Plan Days 13 and 14
How important are sound effects in films? In stage plays? In radio programs? To gain an understanding of the impact of these special effects, class members watch a short video spoof of the sound in a scene from Star Wars: A New...
Smithsonian Institution
The Vocal Blues: Created in the Deep South of the U.S.
Bring the sounds of the deep South vocal blues to the classroom with a Smithsonian Folkways lesson. In preparation, scholars listen to and count the 12 bar blues patterns in several works and identify the I, II, IV, and V chords as well...
Smithsonian Institution
Songs, Sounds and Stories from the Georgia Sea Islands
American music is the result of the influence of many cultures, including the traditions brought by the African slaves. Young scholars study the polyrhythms, the call-and-response format, and the vocal improvisations of the Gullah...
Curated OER
Loud or soft?
Send this cute activity home with kids, to increase family involvement. They'll consider what would happen if rice was bounced in a tambourine, and then they'll complete a sound activity by makings an instrument out of wax paper and a...
Curated OER
The Listening Walk
Learners play instruments that reflect sounds in the story: hoots, toots, creaking, shrieks, clacking, crunching, whooshing, etc. They make vocal sounds from the story: whispered, sniffled, sigh, giggled, croaked, laughed. The...
Curated OER
Sound for Sight
Young scholars study echolocation and understand how dolphins use it to locate prey, escape predators, and navigate their environment. They view a video, "In the Wild-Dolphins with Robin Williams" and see first hand how dolphins...
Curated OER
Aaaa! It's A!
Exercise phonemic awareness of the vowel /a/ to help children become successful readers. They connect spoken phonemes to written grapheme's and create a relationship between the vocal gesture of /a/ and its grapheme map in text and words.
Curated OER
Vocal Exploration
Students explore vocal anatomy. In this biology/music lesson, students first learn vocabulary associated with the voice and body. They then use straws, microphones and recorders to differentiate between high and low pitches and...
Curated OER
Sound and Hearing
In this sounds worksheet, students will review how sound is created by vibrations. Students will understand what creates vibrations and how the ear receives those sound waves. This worksheet has 10 fill in the blank, 9 multiple choice, 1...
Curated OER
The Insect World
Students investigate how insects communicate since they cannot use their mouths for producing sound like humans can. In small groups, they devise a way to make an insect-like sound using body parts other than their mouths or vocal...
Curated OER
Sound/Story
High schoolers combine creativity with the rigor of careful editing by adding music to their story. It forces them to focus on how they communicate the meaning of their story to the listener.
Curated OER
Indiana Igloo
Your young charges practice identifying the /i/ sound in this lesson. The class looks at words on cards and identifies which word has the target sound. They continue their practice using Elkonin letterboxes to spell words with the /i/...
Curated OER
Valentine Singing/Guessing Game
Young scholars sing songs and explore different vocal sounds. As they sing songs, students discover and mark phrases. They sing songs as a class, in groups, and individually. Young scholars, in groups, play a guessing game with the songs.
Smithsonian Institution
The Sounds of an Island: Jamaican Music for the Classroom
Introduce young explorers to the music and history of Jamaican culture through game songs and dances. As a bonus, class members get to play simple songs transcribed for the recorder.