Homemade is great. I also highly recommend going to yardsales and look for musical instruments. You can furnish your life at a yard sale.
Put any of the following inside of plastic bottles, cans, etc: rice, popcorn, erasers. Just so ya know, the popcorn inside the little Gerber juice bottle shown above, makes alot of racket, as my daddy used to say.
We would use our "instruments" and march around the room or whatever.
The wooden blocks were used for when we would sing "Wise Man, Foolish Man". We would beat them together (building) for the wise man part and rub the sandpaper sides together for the "Foolish Man" part. Per my husband when I made these "They're going to mash their fingers beating those blocks together." I figure they won't do it but once and then they'll learn not to do it again.
I also took pictures of each of the children and used them ALOT. One thing I used them for was to put each child's picture on a fat popsice stick and let them hold it when we would sing "I Am a Child of God".
The "drum" shown above is just a couple of balloons stretched across a tin can - said tin can having been emptied of all contents first.
Little girl on a stick is what we used for singing "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam". I tried to make/match cutouts to children's looks.
FYI: I just collected fingerplays from lots of different sources, typed them up and put them together in my own little personal book.
When I was Nursery Leader, they didn't have that fabulous, wonderful Nursery manual that they have now, with all of the fabulous, wonderful take home items for every lesson in the book. We had to use the Sunbeam manual and adapt it to Nursery. I was very one-track-minded about wanting them to have a visual to take home every week, with every lesson. Therefore, I had to wrack my brain to come up with something every week. The OCD side of me would come out and once I got something in my brain for that particular lesson, it had to be done.
Thus it was with the lesson on Music. I made a CD using certain songs from the Primary songbook, and then made their own little Nursery-adapted music book to go with it. I did 2 different ones and alternated then each year. Am I nuts? Probably so. But it had to be done.
Year "A":
Year "B"
**Note: On the Family Prayer one, I cut out little tiny people with my Sizzix (See the Follow the Prophet - Adam was a Prophet picture from a couple of years ago), and put them around the circle. For some reason, they were not in this one I used for taking my pictures of today.
Again, I used lds.org, Sizzix cutouts, my own photos and clipart CDs.
