Now that summer vacation is here, I asked Laura to look through her Brownie book and choose a few Try-Its (the Brownie version of merit badges) to do this summer. I wanted to let her decide which ones to work on at home (instead of me picking ones I thought she could handle and would be interested in, as we've done before), but I did designate this as "The Summer of the 'Point-Down' Try-Its"! -- the various Try-Its are supposed to fit together on a girl's vest or sash in a solid line, as in the examples here, but since it turns out that at least two-thirds of the Try-Its are point-up, Laura has earned many more of those, leaving a number of empty triangles on her vest -- even though I did turn a rather ambiguous one on its side!
We all three snuggled on my bed the other night and debated the point-down choices, but Laura's eyes had lit up so many times when she saw the illustration of "melody glasses" in the "Making Music" Try-It, that I said, "Well, let's do it right now!"
The hard part was finding enough glasses -- we had to use a variety of sizes and shapes, which made tuning quite a challenge!
You fill glasses with various levels of water -- the more water in the glass, the lower the tone produced -- and then tap the glasses gently in turn to play simple songs. It's probably easiest to have identical glasses -- although, curiously, I did find that one of ours, despite being apparently exactly the same as the others, always rang an F no matter how much water was in it. You need only six glasses to play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," but of course a full eight-tone scale gives you more scope. Have a towel handy, as re-tuning can make for a wet countertop!
(There is a typo in the 2000 edition of the Brownie Try-Its book on this page -- "so high" should be 3 and 2, not 2 and 1, and the same with "the sky.")
I highly recommend using a wooden spoon, not a metal one, by the way, judging by how enthusiastically the girls played "Twinkle, Twinkle"!