Music from veggies?

Who would have thought that people would have been able to make a musical instrument from a Vegetable?

All around the world people are no longer making musical instruments from the 'normal' materials or junk, but are exploring new sounds and new ways to create instruments from all different kinds of vegetables!


As an imaginative way to teach through creativity I looked at trying to make adapt an activity like this for children in the classroom and found innovative and imagination capturing workshops help by a project called Growing Sounds:
Growing Sound is a cross-curricular workshop, for primary and secondary schools, that uses making musical instruments from fruit and vegetables as the focus for exploring music, the physics of sound, plant biology and the environment.

Using peppers to make shakers, watermelons and pumpkins for drums, carrots for kazoos and cucumbers for clarinets are the more basic examples of the instruments that can be made. This activity provides a blank canvas for children to explore not only the food and their physical properties but the range of different sounds and effects that can be made using them in different ways.  

Detailed videos of how to make some of these veggie instruments can be found here @ 
http://www.growingsounds.sound101.org/veg.html

Water bottle Maracas!

1. 
   
   
   
   Making water bottle maracas!!

   Here's a creative way to use food in a music lesson to create different sounds:

   Place 2 tablespoons of noisemakers such as beans or rice into an empty, completely dry water bottle. Replace the lid tightly. 

   

   Decorate the water bottles with tissue paper, colour strips of paper, stickers and designs etc.  Once the any decoration has dried attach half a kitchen roll to the top of the water bottle over the lid using masking tape or electric tape. make sure this is secure. Cover the whole piece of kitchen roll with tape to secure it.

   

   
   

   Once this has been done turn the bottle over using the kitchen roll as the handle and shake, shake, shake!

How to start composting in your school!

Make a compost patch/pile/bin in your school!

Compost is organic material that can be added to soil to help plants grow. Food scraps and yard waste currently make up 20 to 30 percent of what we throw away, and should be composted instead. Making compost keeps these materials out of landfills where they take up space and release methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

So what are the benefits of Composting?Enriches soil, helping retain moisture and suppress plant diseases and pests.
Reduces the need for chemical fertilizers.
Encourages the production of beneficial bacteria and fungi that break down organic matter to create humus, a rich nutrient-filled material.
Reduces methane emissions from landfills and lowers your carbon footprint.
There are many different ways to make a compost pile. Regular mixing or turning of the compost and some water will help maintain the compost.

How to do it?

All composting requires three basic ingredients:

Browns - This includes materials such as dead leaves, branches, and twigs. Provides carbon
Greens - This includes materials such as grass clippings, vegetable waste, fruit scraps, and coffee grounds. Provides nitrogen.
Water - Having the right amount of water, greens, and browns is important for compost development. Provides moisture


Select a dry, shady spot near a water source for your compost pile or bin.
Add brown and green materials as they are collected, making sure larger pieces are chopped or shredded.
Moisten with water (a watering can) materials as they are added to the compost pile.
Once your compost pile is established, mix grass clippings and green waste into the pile and bury fruit and vegetable waste under the compost material. Regular mixing or turning of the compost and some water will help maintain the compost.
Optional: Cover top of compost if possible to keep moist. When the material at the bottom is dark and rich in colour, your compost is ready to use. This usually takes anywhere between two months to two years.

Other creative ways of using food in the classroom.

Did you know that alot of food holds medicinal value? Why not try making your own beauty products in class to sell of for the children to take home?

Here are a few ideas that could be used in class:

Face masks:

Honey has antibacterial properties, it is an antiseptic and is useful in treating cuts, wounds, and abrasions.It is a good cleanser and a very effective moisturiser for the skin. Honey properties also protect your skin under the sun. 
Try mixing
Honey with lemon juice for a cleansing facemask.
Honey with bananas to help with acne and blemishes
Honey with avocado to help with dry skin

Soap bags

HERBAL BATH BAG

A herbal bath bag, is a great alternative to soap and are great for little gifts for Christmas, birthdays and mother’s day.

Ingredients

50g organic fine oatmeal (or oatmeal and ground almond blend)

50g dried organic lavender

This recipe uses only two ingredients (or three, if you like) which cuts down on cost.

Shelf-life: 3 months, as a dry mix

Skin types: suitable for all

How to make it:

1. Break apart half of the lavender, leaving the rest whole

2. Mix all the ingredients together

3. Tie up in a muslin circle with raffia to make a little sack

4. You can make several of these up at once and store them in a glass jar

How to use:

Add to warm bath and use the oaty bag like soap.

Making A Lemon Battery

Here's how you can use a source of food to create a source of electricity with the children in your class!

Pass the lemons out. Have the children soften them up a little by squeezing them or rolling them on the desk like a rolling pin.
Pass out one zinc nail (this is the negative: -) and one cooper nail or copper penny (this is the positive) as they do this.
Model then ask the children to insert the cooper and the zinc into the lemon (one on each end).These are the electrodes.
Pass out the crocodile clips to each group and have them start connecting their lemons together. Remind the students that the electrons flow because of the difference between the metals. Therefore, the “battery” will work if they attach a brass nail to a brass nail.
Here is a diagram of how the lemons should be connected

Pass out the LED lightbulbs and ask children to connect their clips to this.

Turn out the lights and see if the lemons have managed to become a battery! The more lemons you use, the brighter the light. Try using more lemons or join the groups together to make a bigger circuit!

How make make our own clothes dye from food?

Here's a fun and creative way of incorporating food into your classrooms without eating it!

Curricular area - Social Sciences, Science

Skills - Problem Solving

This activity involves using real foods to create different colours of dye, a creative way of combining science with social studies if you are looking at how the Celts or the Vikings lived.

Process:

Step 1: The children would work in groups of 4 or five and each have a fruit or vegetable (or portion of) to cut into small pieces. The transferable skill here would be chopping the food safely which would be modelled and supervised by the class teacher. Once the children have chopped the food they will place it a pot, making sure it is only one type of fruit of vegetable in each pot (there may be four or five groups with different foods). The children would then have to measure twice as much water in volume, as the food and add this to the pot. This part of the lesson will provoke an element in problem solving as there is no teacher led specific method given as to how to do this in order for the children to ‘work this out’ for themselves. This will allow children to build on their previous knowledge and deepen their own learning as they are learning through the process.

Step 2: Once the pot with the water has been placed on the hot plate (supervised by the teacher) or cooker – whichever is available in the school, the water should be brought to a boil and then left to simmer for an hour. At this part of the process you may want to

Step 3: In pairs, taking turns, the children should pour the cooled mixture through a strainer and into a second large pot then discard the fruit or vegetable material in the strainer (you could put this in a compost pile, see activity 6). This liquid dye should be set aside in the second pot until Step 6.

Step 4: Place your cotton fabric (ideally a t-shirt) in a large pot. Add four parts water to one part vinegar to the pot, using enough liquid so that the fabric is covered. This will create a dye fixative. Simmer the cotton in the fixative for one hour.

Step 5: Allow the pot to cool before pouring off the fixative and rinsing the fabric thoroughly with water. Squeeze out excess water from the cotton but do not dry the material.

Step 6: Place your cotton material into your dye liquid from Step 3. Simmer the liquid lightly for up to an hour or more. One person from the group can check the fabric every 10 – 20 minutes to see the progress of the dying.

Step 7: Stop simmering and let the pot cool once the desired colour is reached. Remove the fabric, squeeze out the excess liquid and hang up to dry. For variety you could leave one or two groups’ fabric in overnight to create a stronger dye. 

Don't have the facilities to do this? Try using food colourings or coffee to make a simpler version of dying your own clothes.