African Dondo Drums

I found this post on Pinterest and was excited to try this project. However, upon more research I discovered that the image in the pin is not authentic to the shape of actual African drums unless the strings are added to make Dondo drums-also called Talking Drums. 

We started with two styrofoam cups that were hot glued at the bottom. I showed the students how to cover the heads of the drums with masking tape by putting one piece straight across the opening and then putting another piece right next to it, overlapping in the middle. The covered both sides of the drums and then covered the rest of the cups. Be sure to use small (1-2") pieces of tape or it will become lumpy. 

For the color, we used shoepolish, which I got from the post linked above. I LOVE this idea. Not only have the kids never heard of shoe polish, but it now comes in these handy tubes with a sponge on top so the kids could just rub it on and not have to buff at all. Plus, it smells really good and dries much faster than paint. They used permanent markers to add line patterns on their drums and then I showed them how to use a hot glue gun. They hot glued the string in a zig zag pattern across the drum until they had it glued all the way around. I gave them the option of adding some ribbon over their hot glue.

See our gallery here (Houlton to come!)