Matching Musical Notes
A Musical Sensory Activity

© Beverley Paine, 2005

I first saw and heard this activity when visiting a Montessori Kindergarten about two decades ago. We made up our own version, from memory, when at home, using whatever musical instruments were to hand. The aim of the activity is to prepare the child for music and to improve auditory discrimination of sound, that is, pitch.

The Montessori class used 26 bells and a wooden mallet for striking them, together with a silencer for stopping the sound as well as a chart replicating the black and white keys on a piano. We used a child's xylophone, a piano or recorder, and a piano chart that I had made, with the names of the key notes marked in the appropriate spaces. This was mostly for my own use as I was also beginning to learn to read music!

April would pick a note from the chart which I would play, and then she would experiment by hitting notes on the xlophone until the notes sounded the same - that is, they were the same pitch. This exercise is quite different from the original Montessori one, but the end result is similar, so we didn't mind.

In addition to musical skills, this activity builds maths and language skills, using comparative language such as high, low, higher, lower, highest, lowest; the names of the notes of the scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do; or the name of the pitches produced by playing the instruments.

We had a box of percussion and home made musical instruments on the shelf that the children had continuous access to and was usually played with for some time after an activity like the one above.