Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i Click Science and Discovery Magazine for Preschoolers and Young Children

There are four families of musical instruments in an orchestra. Here are a few from each group. Most woodwind instruments are straight hollow tubes. A musician blows air, or wind, through one end to make sound. A bassoon is bent in the middle. If it were straight, it would be taller than a grown man. Brass instruments usually look like coiled metal tubes. Players buzz their lips into the mouthpiece to make sound. A trumpet has three buttons called valves. A musician presses them to play different notes. A trombone has no valves. Players slide part of the tube in and out to play different notes. Flutes were once made of wood, but now they’re usually made of metal. The tuba is the largest member of the brass family. Uncoiled,…

Musical instruments come in many sizes. You can fit a harmonica in your pocket. A concert grand piano is bigger than a queen-size bed. A few instruments are even too large for a person to play. The wind plays The Singing Ringing Tree. Built of stacked steel pipes, the musical sculpture stands nearly 10 feet tall at the top of a hill in England. Its tune changes depending on which direction and how hard the wind blows. The Zadar Sea Organ in Croatia looks like a wide set of white marble steps leading down to the sea. But hidden underneath the steps are 35 pipes connected to plastic tubes under the water. When waves push into the tubes, they push air through the whistle-like pipes to make beautiful music. The…

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It all starts with a tree. With several trees, in fact. Since the first modern guitars were made in northern Spain more than 150 years ago, craftspeople have known that a guitar is only as good as the wood from which it is made. Rosewood, mahogany, maple, spruce, ebony, cedar, willow—the names of the wood almost sound like music themselves! Every guitar is made of several different kinds of wood. Each piece is carefully chosen and then cut to fit the part of the guitar for which it is designed. The most important part of any guitar is the soundboard—the piece of wood with the large hole that lies underneath the strings. Guitar makers are careful to make the soundboard just the right shape and thickness. Then they glue strips…

Birds sing. Dogs howl. But some animals don’t use their voices to make music. Instead, they play their bodies like instruments. Rubbing one body part against another to make sound is called stridulation. Animals stridulate to find mates and to communicate with each other. Crickets sing with their wings. Underneath a cricket’s top wing is a row of bumps, called a file. Its bottom wing has a sharp edge, known as a scraper. When a cricket lifts and shakes its wings, the sharp scraper rubs over the bumpy file and makes a chirping sound. Grasshoppers play their wings with their legs. A grasshopper’s back leg has a row of pointy pegs. To make noise, the grasshopper lifts its leg and runs it along the edge of its closed wing. But…

All over the world, people love making music. But the instruments they play may not be ones you know. Can you name the seven musical instruments shown in these photos? You’ll know them all when you make this book. Just match each instrument with its description. Turn this page over to see how to make the book. What’s your favorite instrument? Bonang One of the main instruments in an Indonesian gamelan orchestra, a bonang consists of small bronze gongs arranged in two rows on a wooden stand. Each gong has a knob on top and looks a bit like a covered pot. To play the bonang, a musician sits on the floor and hits the gongs with padded sticks. Didgeridoo The didgeridoo is a long wooden trumpet from Australia. Modern…

You can play musical instruments in different ways. But the sounds they make—like all sounds—are made by vibrations. When something vibrates, it moves back and forth very fast. Stretch rubber bands of different widths around an empty box or bowl. Pluck one. Do you see it vibrate? The vibrating rubber band makes the air around it vibrate too. You can’t see the vibrations in the air, but they travel to your ears in the form of sound waves. Pluck the widest rubber band. Now pluck the skinniest one. Can you hear the difference in the sound each makes? It can be hard to see, but the thin rubber band vibrates faster than the wide one. The faster something vibrates, the closer together its sound waves are and the higher its…

When Hana Hashimoto announced that she had signed up for the talent show and that she would be playing the violin, her brothers nearly fell out of a tree laughing. “It’s a talent show,” said Kenji. “You’re still a beginner.” “You can barely play a note,” said Koji. “You’ll be a disaster.” Hana squared her shoulders and took her violin and bow inside. She pulled at the strings, letting them twang. It was true that she was still a beginner. She had only been to three lessons. The first time she’d held a real violin had been that summer, while visiting her grandfather in Japan. Long, long ago, Ojiichan had been a violinist for a great symphony orchestra. He still played every morning. From his study, the clear, bright notes…