Making Balloon Shakers

We have made a few instruments at home now and my boy has really enjoyed it. So much so that when we were talking about what we would do this week during self-isolation he said that he wanted to make an instrument.

I thought this might make quite a good project for him (and pass some time one afternoon!) So I asked him to first plan out his instrument in a notebook (writing and drawing practice) and then we would work on making it together. The instrument he had in his head was a balloon shaker, which inspired me to make a version or two myself.

This was my son’s instrument diagram:

And he wrote some quite detailed instructions for making the balloon shaker:

• First put 5 chickpeas inside a balloon.
• Next put 12 dried lentils inside the balloon.
• Then put 5 little pieces of paper inside the balloon.
• Finally blow the balloon up.

He had told me his plan before starting to write it out, so I found a funnel, balloons, chickpeas and lentils and prepared to make the shakers:

Firstly I made a lentil shaker. Lentils were poured into the balloon through the funnel, and then I blew up the balloon. Surprisingly few lentils were needed to make quite a good sound.

And then we tried out the lentil balloon shaker. I loved that you could see the lentils through the latex, I thought it added a bit of an extra sensory element to the shaker.

Then it was the turn of the chickpeas, and they needed a little extra help getting into the balloon, I think finally I used a pencil to poke them down into the balloon. These made a much deeper sound and we needed far fewer of them.

We then made my son’s shaker following his very specific instructions and finally we did one balloon with a mixture of both lentils and chickpeas. We finally sang the song I Hear Thunder with our shakers, a good few times over. The children loved them. They loved making the balloons, they loved shaking them, they loved that they were really quite loud, and we spent almost an hour making these shakers and exploring the sounds they made.