Family Math Activity: Rock Out with a Tissue Box Guitar
Music can be a pathway to practice early math concepts and emotional awareness. We can nurture our children’s interest in music by making our own instruments, like tissue box guitars, and then play along to tunes from different cultures and diverse musicians.
At the same time, children are practicing math skills like pattern recognition, ordinal numbers and spatial sense using everyday materials!
Make this guitar craft to teach kids about music and support their early math and social-emotional development.
Learning Goal
This activity will help your child:
- Expand their understanding of spatial awareness, ordinal numbers and shapes.
- Practice math, design and social-emotional skills through music.
- Introduce elements of music, physical movement, and visual art.
Materials
- Empty tissue box
- Paper towel tube
- Rubber bands
- Tape or glue
- Scissors
- Construction paper, markers, or crayons (optional)
- Pipe cleaners (optional)
Step-by-Step Instructions
1. Talk about the material’s shapes while pointing out the rectangular sides of the tissue box and the round paper towel ring. Encourage the development of design and engineering skills by asking your budding musician to consider how the pieces fit together to become a guitar. Use ordinal numbers, like first, second and third, when talking about the process.
2. Using scissors, cut the opening of the tissue box so the rectangle is a little larger.
3. Wrap rubber bands around the box width-wise to form guitar strings. If you use colored rubber bands, you might consider talking about patterns and arranging them by color.
4. Get creative when making the guitar’s neck out of the paper towel roll. Observe the patterns of the frets (lines) and position markers (dots). You might consider using pipe cleaners or rubber bands for the lines and drawing dots with markers.
5. Secure the neck to the guitar's body using tape or glue. Talk about the position of the pieces as they relate to one another to practice spatial sense. You might also secure the neck more snugly by cutting small slits on the side of the tube and looping the rubber bands through the notches.
6. Practice self-expression by adding color or decoration using markers, construction paper, stickers or other art supplies you have at home.
Keep the Conversation Going
- With your newly constructed tissue box guitar, you can have even more family fun by listening to music by amazing musicians. As you listen, see if you can find any patterns in the music.
- Then, have fun playing and composing music from a variety of genres.
- If you'd like to add dance to your music, try creating one that follows a pattern; or make a more abstract dance with a spinner to helps kids practice using location and position words as they move.
