Give children time to play around with the colours and Noisy Things and discuss what they notice.

The spots on the colour buttons show how many notes will play but aren't strictly indicative of the pattern they will take. The higher up the grid a colour goes, the higher the pitch.

Following this, encourage children to carefully select and combine creatures to create a piece of music. You could try giving them an emotion, like anger or excitement, and see if they can create some music to express it.

Experiment with changing the tempo to create a faster or slower pulse and rhythm.

Maths: Children could use the ‘Letter line up’ ‘Line up: Repeat pattern tiles’ activities to practise arranging patterns to form a sequence.

This activity is great for focusing on texture in music (the layers of sound in music, how they are combined to create a piece of music).

Note that the spots on the colour buttons show how many notes will play but aren't strictly indicative of the pattern they will take. The higher up the grid a colour goes, the higher the pitch.

Ask children to create a ‘light’, ‘thin’ or ‘simple’ piece of music which has fewer layers by selecting less colours at a slower tempo. Then follow this with a ‘heavy’, ‘thick’ or ‘complex’ piece by layering more sounds together quickly.

Try giving the class a stimulus, such as an image (for example, someone dreaming, outer space, a thunderstorm or an image from the ‘Make a masterpiece’ folder) or word (for example, powerful, energised or mournful), and see if they can compose a piece of music, using the Noisy Things, which might fit the image or word.

This activity also gets children exposed to thinking about timbre in music by noting how each of the Noisy Things creates a unique sound and how they compliment or work alongside each other.