Student-created instruments include toe-tapping fun

You might have seen an Australian didgeridoo or maybe even an African kalimba.

But how about a Plunko, a Guitarophone or The Big S?

Unusual musical instruments arrived Tuesday at Deer Park Elementary at the hands of their inventors, students who had turned household trash into music -- or at least twangs.

Deer Park's music teachers Cliff Fouts and Rosalie Lathers challenged their students this month to create working instruments from recycled material. Students got points based on how many sounds and pitches their instruments produced, how they were decorated and their creativity.

The children responded with electric guitars with pizza box bodies and duct tape finishes, soda bottle maracas filled with Gasparilla beads and other creations from shoeboxes, paper towel rolls and rubber bands.

A third-grader's "Guitarophone" was a combination guitar and xylophone, with strings instead of bars and bottle caps that hung below for extra clatter.

First-grader Connor Damato looked ready for the drum line with drums he and his father made from coffee cans and other old containers, slung over his shoulders by a retired backpack.

"It took us all night," the 7-year-old said.

Fouts and Lathers developed the project to celebrate March's Music in Our Schools Month, which had a "Just Imagine" theme this year. It also tied into lessons the classes had about vibrations and how different instruments produced sound.

Fouts demonstrated one of his creations to the students - a tube with rubber bands and squiggly Silly Bandz that sounded various tones when he blew into it.

Grace Lingo, 7, developed the "Plucko" with her father. The instrument featured strings of taut wire at one end and rubber bands stretched across an old lampshade at the other.

"It really gets higher," said Grace, who is in second grade, as she plucked each wire string one by one. She even found two glass knobs to mount on the instrument's side to hold a future guitar strap.
Deer Park also has an environmental theme this year, a good match for the recycling aspect of the project, Fouts said.

Bella Bozied, 7, found the centerpiece of her instrument outdoors.

"It's a piece of a tree that I found on the ground when I was playing outside on Saturday," the second-grader said. "I didn't want to buy anything, because I like to make stuff."

She came up with The Big S ("S" is short for stick, she said). About as tall as her, the palm piece had ridges that Bella could strum with picks she made and painted.

She was even thinking about what else she could make.

"Maybe I could get a pipe and a piece of wood," she brainstormed. "I can tape them together and I can blow through that."