They may be a little lacking in the handle department, but the kids don’t mind and these homemade maracas don’t sound exactly like store bought maracas. We filled ours with small pieces of cardboard, which make enough noise that the kids are happy and are quiet enough that I don’t mind listening to them all day long. Glue on the lids (hot glue works well) if you don’t want your children opening the containers. Our lids are not glued on, and my kids have had fun emptying and re-filling their bottles.
A few extensions of this activity that we may or may not do:
- Decorate the containers
- Try swapping out different materials to see what they sound like. A few we might try:
- beans
- rice
- pasta
- cotton balls
- Shaking along to the beat in a song
- Counting shakes
- Experiment with putting more or less of a material in the bottle to see how it changes the pitch and timbre of the maraca.
MaryAnne is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.
A fine balance to suit everyone’s ears – I like it!
When we went away to a conference recently sunnyboy and some of the other children at the creche made shakers out of empty small plastic water bottles, with gravel in. Then the creche staff took them away and said they were dangerous :0 Fortunately I stayed at the creche with sunnyboy and was able to rescue his for him!
Noah loves anything that he can make some noise with. Cute!
Nice filling! We did a lot of those for Anna when she was a baby – we filled different containers with different things – rice, pasta, buttons, etc. Never thought of cardboard – it's definitely not as loud as others.
You are so clever to fill them with pieces of cardboard! That's just the perfect amount of noise. I love it, and it looks like the kids did too!
A wonderful and simple idea. Thank you.