Swim Ring Sanity-Saver

It is almost summer, and you can feel it in the air. Not the outside air, since the weather is crazy (It snowed yesterday! No joke!) but the air in the school is thick with kids-gone-cray-cray. Between assemblies, field-trips, indoor field day, and graduations I’ll see less than half my classes this week. Those I do see will be out of their minds with anticipation for summer. Plus, we’ve had indoor recess every day for the past two weeks. What the heck do you do with kids this time of year?

Two words, my friends: swim rings.

Yup. You heard me. No, I’m not telling you to take a personal day and go to a beach. Stop buying that plane ticket to the Caribbean, because can use swim rings as drums. Let that sink in for a bit, folks.

I picked up these swim rings at the Dollar Tree. (Have I mentioned that I love that place? Oh wait, I wrote a whole post about it.) The same ones at Walmart were $3.88, so it’s a good deal. Tire swim rings = coolest thing ever to a 4^th grade boy. I have small yellow rings and big blue rings as well. We use one mallet (you could use two if you have enough) to play the ring, and one hand to steady the ring so it doesn’t go flying.

These rings are a great instrument for pretty much any drum activity, with an added bonus of being interesting and new. I like having three colors, because it makes drum circle pieces a cinch.

Since it’s the end of the year and I don’t have a lot of time to prefect a complicated drum ensemble piece, I decided to keep it simple and play poetry on our swim rings.

For primary kiddos, we read Commotion in the Ocean by Giles Andreae. Get it from Amazon here. We read all the poems, students chose their favorite, and then we wrote out the rhythm. Most of them are simple enough that quarter/eighth notes work fine. Once we had the rhythm down, we went to swim rings and played the poem.

My 5^th graders are losing their minds. They are a tough group anyway, but with two days left they’ve gone bonkers. (The weather doesn’t help... Snow. In. May. What?!) 4^th and 3^rd graders aren’t much better in the sanity department. So to combat the insanity, we read Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee. Get it from Amazon here. Once we had the poem down, students created an ostinato to go with. Students then transferred to swim rings, and a few students on the smaller rings performed the ostinato. It was fun to experiment and see what they came up with. One class was obsessed with saying “BOOM!” when they got something right, so we made that our ostinato. Another class opted to do a three-part round, so we had the tires go first, followed by the blues, followed by the yellows.

These swim rings are definitely going into my tool box as an end-of-the-year lifesaver.