Teaching resources
What are these resources for?
These resources have been designed to allow the Growing Sound Project to be run by teachers in their own schools. All of the workshop activities are referenced to the National Curriculum and the QCA Schemes of Work for KS2.
Although the original Growing Sound Project is based around a whole day of activities, we appreciate that not every school can devote this amount of curriculum time to Growing Sound workshops. In order to provide maximum flexibility the workshop resources are presented in bite size units allowing a mix and match approach to suit individual needs.
You can download all of the worksheets and other resources from the table below.
In the video below, Steve Mesure explains how the growing sounds workshop works. For a detailed explanation of the resources download the teachers guidence document;
Lesson plans / teaching resources
Move the mouse over each of the Worksheets to view a little more information about the activity and click to download the worksheet. Worksheets are in Microsoft Word or Powerpoint formats. (grey links will be available mid october 2008)
Section
Worksheet Title
- Space and Motion
This activity is a great way of getting everybody warmed up (physically and mentally) by introducing the idea of representing science physically in a large space. It will also give children a sense of the particulate nature of matter, help them to understand the differences between solids, liquids and gases and introduce the notion of Brownian Motion.
For teachers – Brownian motion is the name given to the random motion of particles in a liquid or gas. It was named after the botanist Robert Brown (1773 – 1858) who first noticed it when using a microscope to examine pollen grains floating in water.
- Space and Motion Part 2This activity follows on from the first Space and Motion activity and allows pupils to understand how sound waves can move through a fluid (a gas or a liquid) and a solid. It also introduces vibration, attenuation and resonance.
- Sound Wave
This activity helps children to understand the key property of waves as a means of transferring sound energy, i.e that sound energy is transferred from location to location without the need for matter to also travel from location to location.
It covers some of the material already presented in part 2 of the Space & Motion activity, but in a slightly different way.
- Sound in a Solid
Some pupils may have difficulty in understanding how sound waves can travel through a solid as they will perceive the particles in a solid to be ‘fixed’ and unable to move. In fluids the particles are obviously ‘unfixed’ and the fact that sound can travel through them is much more intuitive.
This activity builds on the Brownian Motion activities and the Sound Wave activity. It is a fun, fully involving kinaesthetic activity that demonstrates to pupils how sound can, in fact, travel as a wave through a solid material.
- Making Sounds
This activity allows pupils to bring together what they know about sound and apply this knowledge within the context of musical instruments. The activity involves physical theatre and pupils working in small groups of 5 or 6 with the help of an adult.
This activity makes a good round up session for finishing off a sequence of kinaesthetic activities.
- The Biology BitThese notes are just here to give you a bit of background on the biology that crops up in a Growing Sound workshop. We don’t intend you to teach the information in these notes to your pupils because a lot of it is Key Stage 3 or even Key Stage 4 level. It’s purely here as background for you, the teacher and hopefully it will be useful.
- Fruit or Vegetable?
Everyone knows that a runner bean is a vegetable and an apple is a fruit – easy. Yes, of course an apple is a fruit but, scientifically so is a runner bean!
This short activity allows pupils to decide which items from a selection are vegetables and which are fruits. They then find out if they were correct and consider how they decided which was which.
- What is This?
This activity encourages pupils to examine fruits and vegetables in detail and to:
1) think about their physical properties,
2) consider how to recognise/define what is a fruit and what is a vegetable and why,
3) try to work out what part of the plant different vegetables are from,
4) consider how its physical properties suit it to be made into a musical instrument.
- How Does Your Garden Grow? This activity is an exercise where pupils can use their scientific knowledge and imaginations to piece together the lifecycle of a plant.
- How Does Your Garden Grow? Part 2This activity follows on from How does your Garden Grow? Pupils work in small groups to create a list of the properties of different plants and then relate them to how we use those plants.
- What Fruit or Vegetable Am I? This presentation contains a set of four statements designed to narrow down the identity of a mystery fruit or vegetable. Pupils will need to rely on scientific knowledge to identify the fruit or vegetable.
- The Physics Bit
These notes are just here to give you a bit of background on the physics that crops up in a Growing Sound workshop. We don’t intend you to teach the information in these notes to your pupils because a lot of it is Key Stage 3 or even Key Stage 4 level. It’s purely here as background for you, the teacher, and hopefully it will be useful.
- Using the On-Screen Oscilloscope?
An oscilloscope is a device for displaying waveforms on a screen. Oscilloscopes are particularly useful for investigating sound waves and can provide a really simple and graphic illustration of what happens to a sound wave when factors such as pitch and loudness are altered.
Unfortunately the Growing Sound team can’t provide you with one of these - but we can offer you the next best thing! Installed on the Growing Sound CD-ROM is an application called Visual Analyser. This will allow you to do pretty much everything a laboratory oscilloscope can do using just your computer and a microphone. You can also download Visual Analyser from http://www.sillanumsoft.org/.
- Seeing Sound
This activity adds an extra dimension to explaining the ideas of pitch and loudness to pupils. Pupils will be able to see how different shape sound waves produce different sounds by making their own sounds and seeing a real time visualisation on the class whiteboard of those actual sound waves.
- Sound Effects
Most Key Stage 2 pupils are likely to be aware that sound is caused by vibration. However, this cause and effect link is quite often perceived as a one way connection even though the same pupils are likely to understand the basic mechanism of how an ear works. This simple demonstration shows pupils very clearly that not only do vibrations cause sound but sound also causes vibration.
- Slinky Sound
Sound travels as a wave through solids, liquids and gases. It can sometimes be difficult for pupils to visualise how this happens. This demonstration allows pupils to see a simple physical representation of a sound wave.
- Phone a Friend
Pupils will be aware that sound travels through air as it is part of their everyday experience. They may be less familiar with the fact that it travels through liquid although they will all have heard sounds underwater at a swimming pool or in the bath. They are likely to be even less familiar with the fact that sound can travel through a solid.
This experiment has children building their own string and cup telephones and combining them into their very own communications network. The working network illustrates very simply how sound can travel through a solid (the string).
- The Musical Bit
These notes are just here to give you a bit of background on running the musical side of Growing Sound. This only offers a brief outline which refers to the video clips showing Eugene Skeef at work in the Growing Sound musical workshop.
Much of what you do will depend on the instruments that you have available. The ethos of Growing Sound is creativity, flexibility and cross-curricular working, so if you are not very confident of your own musical expertise, why not work with a more confident colleague.
- Warming Up - Videos coming soon
- Clapping - Videos coming soon
- Body Music - Videos coming soon
- Creating a Piece of Music - Videos coming soon
- Making InstrumentsInstructions and examples of different vegtable instruemnts. Includes videos showing the construction and playing of the instruments.
- Instrument ExamplesInstructions and examples of different vegtable instruments. Includes videos showing the construction and playing of instruments such as a cauliflower conch, radish scrapper, carrot kazoo and many more.
