What’s a Boomwhacker?

Recently you might have heard your Elementary student talking about playing the Boomwhackers in music. A Boomwhacker is a lightweight, hollow, color-coded, plastic tube, tuned to a musical pitch by length. Boomwhackers are used as musical instruments in the percussion family. Boomwhackers produce musical tones when stuck together, on the floor, or against nearly any surface.

Here are a few ways that we’ve been using Boomwhackers to learn music: 

• Learning solfege and playing tonal patterns: echoing back patterns they hear and improvising their own.
• Experimenting with different sounds and patterns
• Listening and keeping the steady beat
• Playing along to different types of classical and popular music
• Learning chords and accompanying familiar songs 

Boomwhackers are a great tool for melodic composition in elementary music because students can use the color-coding of the notes to add pitch to rhythms.