They may be a little lacking in the handle department, but the kids don’t mind and these sound exactly like maracas. We filled ours with small pieces of cardboard, which make enough noise that the kids are happy and are quiet enough that I don’t mind listening to them all day long. Glue on the lids (hot glue works well) if you don’t want your children opening the containers. Our lids are not glued on, and my kids have had fun emptying and re-filling their bottles.
A few extensions of this activity that we may or may not do:
- Decorate the containers
- Try swapping out different materials to see what they sound like. A few we might try:
- beans
- rice
- pasta
- cotton balls
- Shaking along to the beat in a song
- Counting shakes
- Experiment with putting more or less of a material in the bottle to see how it changes the pitch and timbre of the maraca.
