Incorporate a dried food project into your music lesson plan by discussing how dried items like beans are used to create instruments from around the world. Bring in a few instruments that demonstrate the use of dried food items, such as an authentic set of maracas or a rain stick. Spend some time discussing how and why these instruments are used in their respective cultures. After your lesson, take a bit of class time for the students to make their own dried food-based instruments. A rain stick can be made by pouring beans or seeds into an empty cardboard tube. Seal the ends with round cutouts of poster board and have the kids decorate the finished products with paints or markers.
Because dried foods have such a long shelf life, they can be an ideal material for creating pieces of artwork. For instance, teach your class about the history of mosaics. Have the kids make their own mosaics by gluing dried foods like pasta, beans or seeds to a sturdy background of cardboard or poster board to create a design. For older students, give them a picture of a single object, such as a flower or animal, and ask them to recreate it on poster board using the dried material. Use food coloring to dye the pasta different colors beforehand.
Give a lesson on food preservation techniques, putting special emphasis on methods that deal with drying food. Teach the kids about how drying is the oldest form of food preservation and describe the different drying techniques. Then work as a class to make your own dried foods, such as fruit leather, using sunlight or an oven.
There are a variety of different science projects that can be conducted with dried foods, so try to find an angle that goes along with current learning material. One idea for an in-class experiment would be to find out how much water is in an item such as an orange. Take an orange and weigh it, record the measurement and then cut it up into thin, equally proportioned slices. Leave the slices on a piece of aluminum foil in a warm area for anywhere from 8 to 36 hours. Weigh the completely dried slices; compare the dried weight to the original weight.