﻿Hello everybody. My name's Christian and welcome to today's lesson. And today's lesson is called Diwali Box Zither where we will be making a Box Zither, an instrument using rubber bands and a cardboard box. And I will tell you more about that later. We are going to be making it, and we are going to be doing some listening exercises and movement, and also we're going to be playing it, along with the backing track. So when you're ready, let's begin. Okay, everybody. Now it's time to start our lesson. And like I said before, today we are going to be looking at a Diwali Box Zither. Now Diwali is an Indian Festival of Light where there are lots of candles and lights and lots of Indian music being played. So we're going to make our own, we're going to be making our Diwali Box Zither. We are going to be playing it and playing along to a backing track. Now, parents and carers, you can support your young person by helping to make the instrument and also supporting, playing along with the backing track. But first we need to do a listening exercise. Okay. It's time to listen. So we have two pieces of music here. One is some pop music and the second one is some Indian music. And we're going to move our bodies along to the music and see if we can notice any differences in how we move. Let's listen to track number one. Perfect. Don't want to play that twice. Okay. You'll notice that I moved along very rigidly in time with the music like that. And I hope you did too at home. Okay, let's listen to track number two. Let's see if we can move slightly differently. Let's have a listen and move along with me. Wow. You'll notice I had moved very differently to the first one because there's no solid pulse in our Indian music. So remember when we play our Indian music, we can move freely along with it. Okay. Now it's time to make our Box Zither. Now it's time to gather our resources together to make our Box Zither. And for today's lesson, you will need two marker pens, the large ones. Five or six rubber bands and a shoe box. Now for this video, I didn't use a shoe box. I had an empty package of tissues because I actually didn't have a shoe box lying around. Now you do need a box that has a solid flat top. Okay. So pause the video, gather all your resources together, and then we'll be ready to resume the video and make our Box Zither. Hello, everyone and welcome to the let's make section of our video. So today we're going to make a Box Zither, a Diwali Box Zither. And what you will need, hopefully you've managed to get your resources together, but just in case you haven't, you will need a box. Now I did say on the resources section of the video that you'll need a shoe box. Now that's the best kind of box to use, but I didn't have one. So I've got an empty box of tissues. It will still do the same thing. The most important thing is you use a box with a nice flat solid surface. You'll need two marker pens. Nice big size marker pens. And around six medium sized elastic bands. If you're going to use a larger box, you'll need some larger elastic bands. So, let's begin. The first thing we need to do is take our box and we are going to stretch our elastic bands one at a time over our box. Just like that. You start off in the middle and work our way out. So one, here comes the elastic bag number two, and number three, if I can do it, there we go. Take us halfway across the box. And let's work our way across the other side. Turn it around. Okay, elastic band number four. Number five. I might need to scooch them over a little bit so I can fit them all on. Let's just do some scooching. Perfect. And elastic band number six. Okay. So our elastic bands should be stretched nice and evenly across our box. The second thing we need to do is take one of our marker pens and we're going to slide it underneath one side of our elastic bands. There we go! So just leave two or three centimetres on the end. We're going to take our second marker pen and do the same on the other side. So we're going to scooch that underneath. Here we go. And again, the similar amount of space on the end. It doesn't matter if it's exactly the same. Okay, and that is our Diwali Box Zither made! Fantastic! Right, next we need to see what it sounds like. Okay, everybody. Now it's time to play our Diwali Box Zither. And the first part of this play section is we're going to do two things, okay. This, our marker pen and our second marker pen, these are called the bridge. And what we're going to do is we're going to use our finger to pluck the strings, but we're going to pluck in front of the bridge in this main big section here and also behind the bridge in this smaller section here. So I'm going to do that now. And just have a listen to how it sounds different. Let's have a listen. In front of the bridge. Behind the bridge, they sound quite different. You have a go at home. You can pause the video and have as much time to play around and experiment as you like. And I'll see you in the next section of the video. Okay then, it's time to play the second section of our let's play section of our lesson. So we'll take our Diwali Box Zither. We've already had a go playing in front of the bridge and behind the bridge, but it sounds very interesting. But the next thing we need to do is we're going to take our bridge and we're going to slightly move them as we play. and we should hear some different sounds. So here's the Zither again, without moving the bridge. Here we go. Fantastic. And here it is when I move the bridge, Have a listen to see how it's different. Very interesting. The sound slides around a little bit like the pen. So again, you can pause your video and experiment playing by moving the bridge and I will see you for the next part.

Okay everyone, now it's time for the most exciting part of our lesson. It's time to play our Box Zither. And I have my completed Box Zither here. I have the bridge using our marker pens and I have the elastic bands stretched across them. Now I'm going to play along to my backing track first. And I'm going to use all the different ways of playing the instrument. So I might pluck the strings. I can move the bridge as I pluck the strings. And also, I could play behind the bridge. Fantastic. Alright, I'm going to play the music, and I will play along to the backing track And then it's your turn. Here we go. See if my music's playing. Fantastic. I really enjoyed that. Now it's your turn. I'm going to play the backing track again, and you can play along to it. Here we go, I hope you're ready. It's time to play. Okay. I hope you had fun with that. And that brings us to the end of today's lesson. And a great big thank you for the fantastic work that everybody's achieved today. I really enjoyed it and I hope you did too. Now, if you would like to, you can share your work with Oak National and ask a parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. Tagging at OakNational and hashtag Learn With Oak. And again, thank you very much for watching and I will see you again for another lesson.

In this lesson, we will learn how to make a Box Zither and perform some Indian music for the Diwali festival.

In this lesson, we will learn how to make a Box Zither and perform some Indian music for the Diwali festival. Resources provided by St Giles School Derby, Spencer Academies Trust (CC BY-NC-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0)

Lesson overview:Diwali Box Zither

Core Content

Equipment Required

Content guidance

Supervision Level

Celebrations and Festivals :