Try These Sound Activities With Your Child at Home!

Try These Sound Activities With Your Child at Home!
Page content

You can do these fun sound activities with your child at home! Build on what your preschooler is learning about in class.

  • Matching Sounds - Collect 12 empty film canisters, frozen orange juice cans, or covered baby food jars. Fill two with rice, two with coins, two with small dried pasta, two with water, two with pebbles and two with beans. Let your child shake them and play a matching game to try and match the sounds that are the same.

  • Musical Instruments - Provide your child with musical instruments to play. Talk about how the different instruments sound. If you are really feeling creative, make your own instruments and have a parade or a concert. Play a tape recording of different instruments and let him try to identify the different ones. A great book to support your sound activities and help your child learn more about instruments is Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin by Lloyd Moss.

  • Vibrations - Talk about vibrations. Show your child how to feel the vibrations when she touches the sides of a piano, television, or radio. Have her place her hands on her throat and feel the vibrations when she whispers, talks and shouts.

  • Water - Fill four or five matching glasses with different levels of water and have your child run a wet finger along the edge of the glasses to hear the tone. The tone will vary depending on the amount of water in the glass. Discuss high and low tones.

  • Listening Walk - Take your child on a listening walk. Encourage him to listen for as many sounds as he can hear. Then talk what you heard. Talk about what sounds you might hear if you went on a walk somewhere else like the beach or the jungle. Pay attention to the different sounds that you hear when you are out and about with your child and point them out to her.

  • Books About Sound - Share some books about sound with your child. Oscar and the Bat: A Book About Sound by Geoff Waring and Sounds All Around by Wendy Pfeffer are good choices for younger children. These books and other books about sound can be found here.

Your child will become a sound expert and have lots of fun too after trying out some of these activities!