I had some classmates over to my place to make papier maché maracas. I prepped by cutting newspaper into strips of different widths and lengths and shapes so we could experiment with what worked best. I covered the kitchen table with newspaper sheets, and had balloons, tape, toilet paper rolls, flour, and beans ready. When the others arrived, they brought rice and popcorn kernels to use in experimentation of sound differences.
We began the base structure of our maracas by inserting beans, rice, or popcorn kernels into our balloons, blowing them up, and securing the balloons to toilet paper rolls with tape. In hindsight, we may have over-secured the balloons to the toilet paper rolls. We forgot that balloons have a tendency to deflate over time, and that we’d have to remove the balloon skin from the inside of the maracas at some point.
Once the structures for the maracas were ready, we started making the papier maché mixture. We decided to make two separate batches to experiment with each method. For the first, we boiled water on the stove, and added the boiling water to a premixed half and half mixture of flour and water, then added more flour and beat the mixture with a fork. For the second, we simply added hot tap water to flour until a desired consistency was reached. We also experimented by adding a teaspoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of salt to each mixture as I’d read that the cinnamon takes away the not-so-great smell, and the salt helps prevent mould from occurring once the pieces are dry. The smell was not completely eliminated, but the cinnamon definitely helped a small bit.
We then began dipping pieces of newspaper into the mixtures and applying them to our maraca structures. We found that the newspaper strips cut into arcs worked best as they fit the roundness of the balloons better than the rectangular strips. Thinner strips had a smoother finish, but took more time, where thicker strips covered everything more quickly, but left a bumpier finish. If doing this with students, I would have all different sizes and shapes of newspaper strips pre-cut for them so both the perfectionists and those with short attention spans could find enjoyment in the completion of the papier maché-ing.
The boiled water mixture was meant to yield a clear finish, which it did. The simpler mixture with tap water yielded a whitewashed finish, as expected. I actually preferred the simpler hot tap water mixture. The whiter finish left the maracas easier to paint without the dark ink from the newspaper showing through. This mixture also seemed to yield a stronger finish, although less smooth than the boiled mixture. If however I wasn’t planning on painting my maracas, I might have used the boiling water mixture, and for the last layer used coloured construction paper instead of newspaper to have a coloured finish.
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Days later I painted my Mexican Maracas using the colours of the Mexican flag (although I had to replace the flag white with yellow as I didn't have white paint). They turned out wonderful!! I like the different sounds they make based on the contents.
I also made a small shaker filled with rice without a handle while we were making maracas, and I painted it to resemble a bumblebee. It would be fun to incorporate this art activity into a unit on Insects, perhaps making other instruments that sound like insects, like cricket sounds from rhythm sticks!
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