Putting music on the staff can start as early as 1st grade with students, and even younger if you are talking about high/low. Changing up manipulatives is a great way to keep lessons feeling fresh when you are using them often. Here are five staff manipulatives to use it the music classroom.

Yarn
Yarn is an incredibly inexpensive, EASY manipulative. It is great for high/low or sol/mi when you are only working with two notes and you don’t want to worry about putting things in lines or spaces yet. While I think that introducing lines and spaces early is a good idea, those first times of showing them is great with yarn.
A favorite lesson of mine is to use the yarn for a vocal exploration lesson earlier in the class before you introduce that one line staff. Then the students get to take the yarn home and show the parents what they did in class that day! And you aren’t stuck trying to organize 30 strips of yarn.
Pro Tip: After students are comfortable with yarn, draw the line on the board with the notes touching the center line of your one line staff. Then show that there are more lines by drawing in the lines above sol and below mi and the note heads have to touch those lines as well. It’s a great way to introduce spaces which makes a nice transition to the three line staff.
Paper

Probably the most simple, this one is an easy one. Print one side with a three line staff and one side with a five line staff. Laminate and have forever. Put on colored paper for even more fun.
Here’s some free staff paper for you to print. 🙂

Gloves
Come fall/winter, it is easy to find those extremely inexpensive gloves everywhere and they make great staff tools! If you’ve ever used a hand staff (5 lines = five fingers with 4 spaces in between), these are a slightly more obvious way of showing that.
The gloves below have two options. The pink is puffy fabric paint which works REALLY well. The green is acrylic paint which will save you a little budget if you can “borrow” some from your art teacher coworker.
I don’t use these with a notehead manipulative but simply a point and sing or point to what you hear.

Dry Erase Boards
Dry erase boards are a common manipulative that are easily obtainable. There are even ones you can find with a staff already on it.
Pros:
- wipe and go
- fairly cost effective
- long life
- can use lots of things for note heads
Con:
- markers are not cost effective but easily obtainable
Fabric
I’ve heard in the past there were actually places that had teachers sew their own felt staves to use in the classroom and cut out the felt note heads. While felt works great and is inexpensive, my sewing machine couldn’t handle it. Felt is also not super durable to handle a lot of washing machine trips.

BUT….
Microfiber is!
So I have made these microfiber staves to use. Even better, the felt doesn’t just fall off if you pick it up. They will move if you pick it up completely, but if a kid bumps it while they’re working on it, they won’t lose everything. You can see a video of it in action here.

Note Heads
With all these fun staff options, here’s a few things you can use as noteheads:
- mini erasers – these are PERFECT for seasonal work
- bingo chips
- large bingo chips which are nice with your younger students
- stones/rocks
- glass decor beads
- buttons
- beads
- felt circles
- written note heads (marker, pencil, etc)
- die-cut shapes
- poker chips
- bottle caps
- foam pieces
I hope this has given you some great ideas!
