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Gretchen Jensen has taken her fifth-grade music classes at Crystal Spring Elementary School a step further. Instead of simply giving her students instruments to play, she had them build the instruments first.

Today, in her Roanoke classroom, sit two beautiful marimbas, a kind of large xylophone thought to originate in Africa. On Friday, three classes of roughly 17 students cycled through and somehow managed to play three coherent parts on the instruments.

Gretchen got help from Brent Holl, a musician, marimba-maker and a retired teacher from Augusta County. He helped the children build the instruments and showed them how to play together.

One of the school's two marimbas is a bass. They are both made of padauk, a reddish wood with a deep sound. There are hollow PVC pipes under the wood, which add to the resonance, like in a church organ.

Here's how you make a marimba: You take a slat of wood, hold it up on the ends and carve out a hollow depression on the inside of the slat. If you're a fifth-grader, you do this very carefully after having learned how to hold a mallet and wood chisel.

Then you sand the wood and hit the bar with a mallet and listen for the note. You tune it by carving out a little more. Having children play instruments they made gives them a sense of "ownership," Holl said. "They have invested some time and energy into it and they know how it works."

Holl brought two marimbas of his own as well. Crystal Spring's marimbas are the most beautiful marimbas and the best-sounding marimbas he has ever seen, he told the kids.

One thing you must have if you want to play the marimba: swing.

Holl showed the children how to play with swing. It involves pep and rhythm and dancing while you hit the bars with your mallets. The kids were good at that.

"If you don't play like that I'm going to say, 'Please add the swing,' " and you're going to go 'OK,' and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about," he told the children.

Holl showed them how 17 children can play three parts. First, each part plays a solo, then they all play together. The technical (Italian) term for playing together, he explained, is "tutti," as in "tutti frutti."

"So if I say tutti, that's everybody," he said. "All the little fruttis."

While they played, a little unsteadily at first, he kept time with shakers known as maracas. Jensen took over the maracas and Holl picked up a tune on a bamboo flute.

Taylor Thompson, who was on the bass, described the experience as "really cool but sometimes it's hard to keep up with them."

If you're scoring at home, that's 17 students, four marimbas, three parts, two adults, one pair of maracas and one bamboo flute.

"Not too bad," Holl said when it was over.

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With state budget cuts looming, the Roanoke County school system is easing its employees into the idea that budgets might get tight. In a districtwide newsletter, Superintendent Lorraine Lange and school board Chairman Jerry Canada told staff that they face "a serious situation."

The school system could face a state funding cut ranging from $3.3 million to $9.9 million, a not insignificant part of the district's $143 million budget. The school system is considering going to a four-day week, reducing staff, closing or consolidating Roanoke County Central Middle School, an alternative program based in Vinton, or putting off construction projects.

"We know that some of the budget decisions we have to make will be unpopular," they wrote. "We ask that you keep a positive outlook on the situation and look at what you can do to work more efficiently and/or find ways to save money."