Honey Hill’s Noisy Day – Music Activity

We’ve been really enjoying reading Honey Hill’s Noisy Day as part of our April Little Bookclub selection on exploring sound. The Honey Hill friends are practicing with their musical instruments for a special performance, which makes it a perfect choice for thinking about different noises. As I was reading it with ToddlerGirl, I decided to do a very simple activity to go alongside it.

Of course, the obvious activity to do with this book involves musical instruments! I had a look through the instruments we have for ToddlerGirl and selected ones that matched those featured in the book. I had to improvise a little, so we ended up with:

A toy piano (I switched the song setting off, so that the keys just played notes rather than whole tunes!) A mini maracas Some bells (to symbolize a tambourine) A round cake tin and a wooden spoon for a drum

ToddlerGirl and I read the book together once, then we went through it again, picking up and playing each instrument in turn. For our next reading, I let ToddlerGirl find the corresponding musical instrument and play it. Then we ended with a little freestylin’.

Next, I decided to make a homemade musical shaker with ToddlerGirl. I had a clean, dry water bottle ready and had put some dry pasta into one bowl and a few pretty sequin shapes into another.

We sat on the floor together and ToddlerGirl carefully dropped the pasta twists into the bottle, followed by the sequins. I have made a few different sensory bottles for her previously but this is the first time I have let her loose in making one herself (obviously under constant supervision!) I’m so glad I did. She took it very seriously and concentrated hard when picking up the pasta and sequins and dropping them into the bottle. I loved watching her little face, completely intent on what she was doing. When she had finished, I sealed the bottle and let her give it a good shake. I made a big deal of the fact that she had done it all herself and we had to show it to Daddy when he came home from work. She’s been looking incredibly pleased with herself, as she should be!

After making our shaker, we sat and went through Honey Hill’s Noisy Day again with all our instruments, including ToddlerGirl’s special homemade one. This has been a great fun activity for us to do together and was really very easy to set up. It’s also been a good way of getting some extra mileage out of our library book!

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