Here’s a fun activity to help with music literacy, fine motor skills, and color identification. If this is something you’d like to try with your students, pick up your own printable Treble Clef Play Dough Worksheets from the Fischarper Teachers Pay Teachers store. There’s a stop-motion video toward the end of this post, too!
Once you’ve purchased the activity sheets, just download them, print, and slip into page protectors or laminate. One thing nice about the page protectors is you can easily keep them in a 3-ring binder.
I made red, blue, & white play dough based on this recipe. Store bought play dough would certainly work too (I used Play-Doh brand in the video)! It looks like we’d already experimented with mixing the colors (that was another learning activity!) when the E worksheet picture below was taken.
You can use this activity for part of a lesson (make sure students wash their hands before touching the instrument again), as homework, or for a music camp activity.
Before your students start this activity, make sure to set some rules. I asked the students questions to go over expectations. Here were some of mine:
Do you mix the play dough colors? (No. Later we did mix some, but that was a directed activity.)
Does the play dough go off your box/lid? (No.)
Use rules & guidelines that you see fit, and phrase them in your own way. It might be more effective to use positive phrasing, such as “the colors stay separate” & “the play dough stays on the box/lid.” Then you don’t risk the student(s) just hearing/processing “mix the play dough” & “off your box/lid.”
You can use a box/lid, or a place mat to keep the surface clean and to give visual boundaries for the students.
This activity is great for a variety of ages. I worked with for a small group of preschool through about mid-elementary school age for this project. But I think it could be fun for about any age! You can also make it more or less difficult for different age groups and/or music levels.
How would you use these printable worksheets?
-Barbara
Barbara Fischer runs Fischarper, LLC and loves her job as a harpist and private music educator. She enjoys blogging about various aspects of the music field on fischarper.com/blog. For more music resources, check out the Fischarper store. Find out where you can find Barbara on the interwebs here. And you can sign up to receive Fischarper updates by joining the email list.