- tape recorder
- high
- low
- sound
MA Standards:
Speaking and Listening/SL.PK.MA.1: Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners during daily routines and play.
Language/L.PK.MA.1: Demonstrate use of oral language in informal everyday activities.
MA Draft STE Standards:
Physical Sciences/Matter and Its Interactions/PS4.B: Apply their understanding in their play of how to change volume and pitch of some sounds.
Head Start Outcomes:
Language Development/Receptive Language: Attends to language during conversations, songs, stories, or other learning experiences.
Language Development/Expressive Language: Uses language to express ideas and needs.
Logic and Reasoning/Reasoning and Problem Solving: Recognizes cause and effect relationships.
Science Knowledge/Scientific Skills and Method: Uses senses and tools, including technology, to gather information, investigate materials, and observe processes and relationships.
PreK Learning Guidelines:
English Language Arts/Language 2: Participate actively in discussions, listen to the ideas of others, and ask and answer relevant questions
Science and Technology/Living Things and Their Environment 15: Use their senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste to explore their environment using sensory vocabulary.
Explore Together (indoors): Voice Pitch
© Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Early Education and Care (Jennifer Waddell photographer). All rights reserved.
STEM Key Concepts: Sounds have a source; Sounds vary in three ways: volume, pitch, and timbre
ELA Focus Skills: Speaking and Listening, Vocabulary
Have children explore pitch with their voices.
- Tell them you are going to help them record their voice.
- Say, We will take turns saying the sentence “My name is <name>. Is my voice high or low?”
- Have children say their name in either a high or low pitch. Demonstrate for children before recording.
Then take an inside walk around your building. Say to children, Let’s go on an inside listening walk around the building and listen for different voices. If you hear a voice we will write it on the clipboard. As you hear people talking, stop and ask children to describe the voice they hear.
- Encourage them to compare voices they are hearing. For example, ask, What did you notice about <Ms. Swanson’s> voice that was different from <Mr. Ling’s> voice?
- If possible, you may want to get permission to record the voices you hear.
Reflect and Share
Gather children in a circle and play back the recordings of their own voices.
- Have children listen to each voice. Ask, Whose voice do you think this is? What makes you think that?
- Then ask children to describe whether the voice is high-pitched or low-pitched.
- Record children’s names on a 2-column chart labeled “High” and “Low” as you play back the voices.
Play back the voices of people you recorded throughout the building and ask children to identify the person and describe the voice.