This term, during England’s latest lockdown, I have been working with a group of key worker children in Reception Class. I have chosen to focus on introducing them to the key musical elements, and so far we’ve had lessons exploring pulse, rhythm, and tempo. This week’s challenge was timbre, which is always a tricky concept to explain. It’s often described as the ‘colour’ of the music or the ‘quality’ of sound - neither of which is particularly helpful when talking to 4 and 5 year olds! I chose to approach timbre through practical activity, with a brief explanation that ‘every instrument has a different sound’ and that that’s what we would be exploring today. We started by asking each child to come out to the front, choose an instrument, and play it to the class. As a group we tried to find descriptive
Timbre Time! Exploring musical colour with EYFS words that matched the sound of the instrument - for example ‘jingly’ and ‘tinkly’ for sleigh bells (although one child did shout out ‘Rudolph,’ which took a while to unpick!). As more and more children had an instrument, we started not only to use describing words, but also to ‘match’ the instruments with other similar sounding ones - asking the children who had already had a turn to hold their instrument up if they thought it matched the one being played by the child at the front. Once each child had an instrument, we made piles on the carpet of similar instruments - our ‘bangy,’ ‘scratchy,’ ‘jingly’ and ‘rustly’ options each being placed on separate carpet spots. We had to go back through these and invite volunteers to say which instruments were in the wrong place, as some of the children matched the instruments by sight rather than sound - for example putting the maracas into the ‘bangy’ group because they were made of This activity was adapted from the Timbre activity in the Musical Learning Starter
