Making Music with Your Trash

Summer is almost over but if you are still looking for a project to keep the kids busy why not make music instruments out of common household trash items. My daughter and I have been saving toilet paper rolls just with these kinds of projects in mind. Other items that can be rescued from the trash and transformed into fun music making tools are:

• plastic water bottles
• oatmeal containers
• coffee cans
• tissue boxes
• plastic silverware

Once you have collected your supplies from the recycle bin, the next step is collecting a few additional items from around the house or the dollar store to complete these fun projects.

Make a Kazoo with Toilet Paper Tubes
Learn how to make a kazoo out of used toilet paper tubes!



Coffee Can or Oatmeal Container Drums
This project is pretty simple and just involves some creative art design. You are going to need and intact coffee can or oatmeal container with lid and art supplies for decorating the outside. You don't necessarily need to glue down your lid unless you want to. I will leave that step up to you. The sky's the limit to how you decorate your drum. I have decoupaged paper onto the outside of my drum. I have used paints and paint pens to make cool designs. Simply taping decorative paper to the side of your drum also looks nice. Once your drum is dry all you have left to do is make some noise...I mean rhythmic music. Plastic silverware makes great drum sticks in a pinch, too.

Water Bottle Shakers
Fill your empty water bottle with beads, rice or beans to make cool shaker sounds. My favorite combo is multi-colored beads and glitter for sparkle. Not much decorating is needed but I would suggest using glue to seal your lid so you don't accidentally loose your shaker contents. Just a precautionary measure.

Tissue Box Guitar
Empty tissue boxes make great guitars with the addition of a few large rubber bands slipped over the hole in the box. Decorate the outside of the box if desired before adding the rubber bands. Once finished you can strum to your hearts content. Experiment with different sized rubber bands for different sounds and pitches.

Now comes the fun part, creating your own recycled music band. Gather your family or some of your children's friends and rock out. Consider adding accompaniment to your favorite children's songs or just turn on the radio and see what's playing.