When you play the xylophone, you use sticks to hit bars of different lengths, and they ring to play notes. Well, one farmer worried that her chickens were bored, so she stuck a xylophone on the wall in their yard to see what would happen. The chickens started pecking at the xylophone with their beaks, and found out that this sounded really great! As you can hear in this video, they play a pretty good song…if you listen carefully, it starts off sounding like “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Wee ones: How many colored bars does the xylophone have? Check out the picture!
Little kids: Which color bar is 2 to the left of the green one? Bonus: There are 11 chickens, but only 7 bars. If each chicken gets 1 bar to play, how many chickens have to wait their turn?
Big kids: If each of the 11 chickens pecks the xylophone twice, how many notes do they play? Bonus: If a song has 8 lines with 6 notes for each, and the chickens take turns in order playing them, how many chickens will get to play 1 more note than the rest?
Answers:
Wee ones: 7 bars.
Little kids: Orange. Bonus: 4 chickens.
Big kids: 22 notes. Bonus: 4 chickens. They need to play 48 notes, so after each plays 4 notes, they will have played 44 so far, leaving 4 more.
