Bucket Drums!
Kids love bucket drumming! It’s rhythmic, energetic, and it can be accessible to kids of all age levels and abilities. There are some safety and classroom management issues when bucket drumming – but they can be solved!
Getting the Stuff
Teachers can opt to get bucket donations and do a “bucket drive” or they can break down and purchase the buckets. The big box stores offer buckets in bulk online. You can order the buckets you need online in bulk and have them delivered right to your school.
Real drum sticks are not as cheap – you can find bulk drumsticks on Amazon, but the quality reviews claim they break easily. You can also use rhythm sticks or make your own sticks from dowels. The Bucket Book and its online blog by David Birrow is an excellent source for ideas and music. He also has some videos online to help teachers create sticks using dowels and duct tape.
Lessons and Resources
There are many resources and materials available for bucket drumming but three stand out: The Bucket Book by David Birrow, BucketDrumming101 by Skye, and Bucketdrumming.net by Sammy Foster. Each resource has its pros and cons.
The Bucket Book: A Junkyard Percussion Manual is a book available from several retailers and has a free online blog with articles, videos and tips. The content is focused on classroom activities and general music lessons and a great place to start with ideas and tips on what instruments to use, classroom management ideas and technique explanations, how to choose music and how to teach it with step by step instructions and demonstration videos. The book comes with a CD and it’s a great starting point.
BucketDrumming.net is a subscription service that offers a multitude of online videos for play-a-longs to popular songs, exercises, warm-ups, technique videos, beat breakdowns, online quizzes, videos about drum fills and improvisation, and downloadable parts and music. It’s a great resource but expensive if you’re using it all year long.
BucketDrumming101 is an online webstore/blog of ideas and tips. The resources section of the website has a teachers-pay-teachers style store with several percussion/rhythm/bucket drumming resources while the blog has a few posts about bucket drumming equipment and the author’s workshops.
More Bucket Drumming Resources and Links
- The Bucket Book Blog
- 5 biggest mistakes teachers make when bucket drumming.
- BucketDrumming.net
- BucketDrumming101.com
- Bucket Drumming resources on Teachers Pay Teachers
