Musical Rainbow Shaker Craft Project

Project Summary:

This musical rainbow shaker project requires a little bit of set-up time but children will love the entire process from design, to building the shakers and finally enjoying using their shakers as musical instruments!

Safety Notice

Please note that children should only play with homemade toys and instruments under supervision as small parts can easily become detached.

Project Details: Musical Rainbow Shaker Craft Project

Step 1: Prepare the materials

You will need paper plates, poster paints and a selection of items to fill the shakers. You will then need to seal the shakers with staples, a glue gun or sellotape.

Step 2: Paint the paper plates

Children will love painting the paper plates in their favourite rainbow colours. Painting rainbows provides a really cheerful and vibrant design. Once the painting has been completed leave the paper plates to dry.

Step 3: Fill the plates with shaker items

The next step is to fold the paper plates in half and fill them with dry items that will produce a shaker sound. It’s fund to choose a variety of items, for example dried chickpeas, rice, lentils, pasta and so on.

A good experiment is to fill different shakers with different items in order to observe the difference in sound later on.

Step 4: Seal the shakers

Once the shakers have been filled, you can choose a glue gun, sellotape or staples to seal the edges of the shakers.

We found staples to be the most secure method of sealing the edges as a glue gun may not hold the edges securely enough when the children begin to rattle and shake the musical instruments later on.

Step 5: Experiment with sound

Once the musical shakers have been sealed with the dry items securely inside, children will love to experiment with loudly shaking their new instruments to their favourite songs!