Procedure
- Have the students plant the seeds. If planting instructions come with the gourd seeds, follow the instructions. Most gardeners have little trouble growing gourds using the following method: Wait until the weather is warm. In a sunny area, make small mounds of soil enriched with compost and plant several seeds in each mound. When the plants sprout, remove all but two or three plants per mound. As the vines grow, remove some flowers and fruits if you want the remaining ones to grow larger, or leave all the fruits on if you want many gourds. Assuming they are growing outdoors, the vines will need watering only if the weather is very dry.
- At the end of the growing season, the vines will begin to wither. Have the students cut or gently pull the gourds from the vines and store them in a dry place with good air circulation. Avoid freezing the drying gourds. You may want to try to speed the drying process using an oven at low temperature, but be careful not to "cook" them. Have the students check them periodically to make sure they are drying out rather than rotting or molding. Wipe off any mold that does appear and move the affected gourd to a dryer area. If necessary, use a fan to keep moist air from building up around the drying gourds. When the gourds are ready, they will feel very dry and be much lighter. (This will take weeks, maybe months.)
- Give the students your presentation on making gourd instruments.
- If there are not enough gourds for each student to have one, have them work in groups. If there are any disagreements as to who will get which gourd, assign the gourds using some sort of random lottery system.
- Give each student or group the
instructions for making their instrument, and let them make and decorate the instruments. Assist with any steps that are difficult for the students.
- Give the students a chance to play the instruments as accompaniment to a song and/or dance, or as part of an activity such as the ones in
Simple Rhythm Activities ,
Music Conducting: Classroom Activities ,
A Tempo Activity ,
A Musical Dynamics Activity ,
A Musical Accent Activity , or
Calypso and Found Percussion , and the resonance activities in
Sound and Music .
Gourds were the most widely cultivated plant in pre-Columbian times. The gourd vine originally grew in Africa, but gourds were so useful that people brought them along wherever they settled. In this way, thousands of years ago, gourds spread throughout the old world, and also throughout the Pacific islands and the Americas. They were much more widespread than any other early domesticated plant, leading some historians to suspect that the gourd was among the first plants purposely cultivated, rather than gathered, maybe even the very first.
Gourds were such a widespread "crop" so early, more widespread than any food crop, partly because they are easy to grow in most tropical and temperate climates, and partly because they can be so useful. Because they naturally grow into a kind of bowl or bottle shape, they are easily made into bowls or bottles to carry or store water, food, and other things.
If the students have been studying pre-industrial societies at all, you may turn this into a discussion point: ask the students what other materials would have been available to make bowls, cups, jars, and bottles (some possible answers: animal hide, wood, clay, cloth, basketry). Ask them how useful each material would be, for example, for carrying water, how sturdy the resulting container would be, and also how much work they think it would take to make a container out of that material. Or you may turn this into an imagination exercise; ask the students to imagine living in a hunter-gatherer tribe that doesn't have any bowls, cups, bottles, or containers. What would they do when they're hungry? Thirsty? What would they do with "leftovers"? What might happen when they need to move to find more food or water? How would these things change if they had bowls and other containers?
