As adults, our experience of music is often passive. We hear a completed song play on the radio, or watch an ensemble perform on stage. As listeners we enjoy receiving this perfected music. Even our teaching of KS2 children and upwards often focuses on gradually working towards a finished performance. But in early years, the musical experiences we hope to create in our classrooms are much more active and varied, so that every child will find a way to join in. We also hope that these experiences will not only be musical but will improve children’s social skills, physical development, focus, and both verbal and non-verbal listening skills, as well as deepen their understanding of the world. In short, we seek to cover the entire Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum.
Active participants
I have often worked with early years children at Wigmore Hall Learning, where the values as a department are care, collaboration and equity. As Early Years Practitioners (EYPs), our starting point for delivering workshops is always asking the question: ‘How can we allow the children opportunities to lead?’ We work with supporting musicians to find creative ways for the children, even if they are pre-verbal, to understand that their choices and actions affect the music. The simplest example is playing percussion instruments together. The focus created by everyone stopping at the same time generates an incredible confidence in the group, and often the practitioners keep that tension until a child leads and begins the music again. By making it obvious we are following them, the child’s confidence in their own leadership develops.
We can do the same thing in the classroom by playing one-to-one on an instrument, for instance a xylophone, with a child and focusing on copying each other’s patterns and adapting them. This is a clear example of sustained shared thinking, which in early years, according to the DfES-funded report The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education Project (2004), means that ‘both parties must contribute to the thinking, and it must develop and extend the understanding’. In other words, the music is created by both parties’ ideas, and is also completely non-verbal.
Physical movement can be used as leadership. Here’s an example. Everyone shakes a hand and one of the musicians recreates similar shapes on their instrument. We then take suggestions from the children for physical movements. The musicians create motifs for the movements and gradually repeat and build them up, with each child leading their own action, until we have created an entire musical piece based on their movements. It’s a world premiere every time! Although most music teachers will not have supporting musicians in the room, they can deliver the same leadership experience by creating musical shapes on a piano, guitar or xylophone.
Graphic scores
Another way we endorse children to lead is through the creative drawing of graphic scores. Some children express themselves more easily through mark making, and with music as inspiration, they are often able to make marks much more freely than when asked to draw in silence. We often add a theme as inspiration; this could be to draw something abstract like a magic spell or a snowstorm, which takes away any of the strictures sometimes placed on EY mark-making to create a realist picture.
When the children have finished their pictures, they show them to the musicians in turn, and we hear an improvised piece inspired by the qualities of the child’s marks. A spiky drawing, for instance, might create a minor, staccato improvisation. It is a wonderful challenge for the musicians, and I will never forget some of the children’s expressions of awe when they hear the music from their picture. Again, this activity can be easily adapted for the classroom without musicians. Recorded music can be used to inspire expressive pictures, then those pictures in turn used to create songs or to inspire a group to play with percussion instruments.
In a recent project, an EYP and I created a graphic score game to make superhero music. It was inspired by the children’s interest in superheroes and the EYP’s hope that the children would master the mathematical skill of understanding patterns. First, as a group we identified the characters (superhero, villain and people in trouble) and plot of a superhero comic, and developed together a musical phrase for each one. After some repetition, the children were able to recognise and perform each one from an action cue. We developed this further by creating pictures for each one and allowing a child to come up to ‘conduct’ the story, which meant they pointed at whichever picture they wanted, and the group performed the sound. This worked particularly well because the child leading did not have to be a confident or very verbal child, and it allowed those whose processing time is a little slower to be confident in their leadership. We further extended this by making lots of laminated copies of the picture cues, and the children laid them out how they wanted in free play time, creating graphic scores of their own devising and – you’ve guessed it! – patterns. The project featured sustained shared thinking from the entire group.
Individual access
Ideally, we would love every child to be able to participate actively in their own way at music group time. Children are, after all, just like adults in the way they are all different and enjoy things in different ways. By creating activities involving lots of different levels and skills, we can engage more of the children in a way which feels right to them. One of my favourite nursery activities uses a song I wrote based on a Spanish folk tune, which I have called ‘Who’s in my house’. The song itself is incredibly simple: five words and three notes, two of which are Mi and So. It is very rhythmic, includes some body percussion, and at the end of the song the children are focused on listening for a mystery sound. They then have the chance to guess what it is. In one short song, we have singing together, rhythm-making, physical movements, atmospheric sounds and a bit of mystery, where the children can enjoy guessing the answer.
By having these different ways in, more children are initially engaged. We also find that the children move more easily through the different access points, and complete all of them more quickly.
Repetition and variety
It is my experience that as soon as children understand a framework, they have unending ideas of how to adapt it. Their interest in the word is unparalleled, and even something familiar like a daily routine can seem as exciting as dinosaurs or undersea creatures. As practitioners we can’t underestimate the sense of achievement and leadership for an EY child when their idea is sung by a whole class. For children whose verbal skills are still developing, repeating and adapting relevant vocabulary is invaluable.
One song I like to use is about different modes of transport. By repeating familiar vehicles like bus, train and aeroplane, and making the sound of each one, gradually as a group we are able to explore more creative answers like horse, submarine and even teleportation! And it’s worth remembering that repetition can open up new avenues. I have seen many EYPs teach a song relevant to a learning topic such as ‘autumn’, using lines with relevant vocabulary such as ‘leaves’, ‘harvest’ and ‘the weather’. However, when the topic is finished, the EYP doesn’t use the song again. I wonder if we could use the children’s familiarity and enjoyment of that particular song’s structure, and their curiosity and creativity, to adapt it to further deepening understanding of the topic. For instance, what events happen in winter and what is the weather like? How would our voices change in summer?
Or perhaps the same song could be used for a completely different topic, developing the details with the children. In a Reception class, I used ‘London’s Burning’ for a ‘People who help us’ topic. In this case, rather than adapt the words, we adapted the way we sang it. The children became ‘composers’ and chose whether to sing it slower, faster, louder, quieter, higher or lower. As well as being a lot of fun, the children’s leadership was endorsed, they learned the difference between the words they used for ‘conducting’, and also learned the words ‘tempo’, ‘dynamics’ and ‘pitch’. For children who are pre-verbal, I might use physical creativity with props such as scarves. For instance, I might sing a song about what the children could make from the scarves. Their well of ideas is never-ending, including clothes, pirate eyepatches, picnic rugs, flowers and even ghosts.
Building opportunities into music time for the children to suggest, adapt and lead has always been beneficial to my practice, and I am always looking for ways to follow their ideas. Just like in theatre improvisation, our answers can always be ‘yes, and…’.
