As an early years music practitioner, something I hear very frequently from staff in a nursery setting is: ‘Oh, yes, we have music time every week.’ What they often mean by this is that time is put aside for everyone to sit down in a group and have an adult-led music session, sometimes from a visiting specialist music teacher. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this; music is so important in the early years, and making provision for it in the week's schedule is a positive step. However, there is something jarring about the phrase ‘music time’ in the context of a nursery. In most settings before the age of five, learning through free play takes up by far the most time, with adults interacting with children based on their interest in the environment around them. This is best practice and, to me, a hugely inspiring place to work – when children are empowered to choose their learning based on their interest, their brains are ready to form connections and bring their own experiences to their learning. If music is reduced only to group time once per week, and even more so if it becomes associated only with an external person – the ‘music lady’, as I have heard children refer to me more than once in my career – is music an option the children can choose during their free learning? Or has it been put in a closed metaphorical box, alongside the literal box which the instruments often live inside between sessions? How can we embed children's musical explorations into the fabric of their nursery, and how can we as adults notice, validate and extend them? As a specialist, should I – the ‘music lady(!)’ – also be part of the free play to see how the children respond to the session?
An enabling environment for music
Think about music in the early years compared with mark-making. In every nursery setting, there will be ways to make marks: drawing, writing or painting on paper, chalking on paving stones, leaving finger trails in salt trays. These activities are built into the environment and provide the children with a clear and inviting opportunity to create something. The marks they create can be recorded and taken home – we can write a name on a drawing and show the rest of the class, and allow the child to explain what their picture is inspired by.
It is more difficult to create opportunities for musical exploration, for several reasons. First, music only lives when it is played, which makes it harder to initiate and to record. Early years children's singing and composition exist only in the moment and can rarely be repeated. Second, the way in which nursery children explore instruments makes it difficult to offer immediately creative opportunities. The joy and sense of achievement for them in playing instruments lies either in exploring sound and timbre or in interacting with someone, coordinating rhythm, dynamics and stops together. Musical instruments are also notoriously difficult to keep in good condition in nurseries – safety concerns mean that they are often made of plastic and do not make the best sound, and the way in which children play for pleasure means that the more fragile, non-plastic ones break easily. There are often concerns about the noise of instruments, and the sensitivity of children in the classroom environment. In terms of interaction, children frequently need to be shown musical interaction modelled by an adult – how exciting it can be to stop playing at the same moment! Once this is established, children are able to recreate this feeling themselves, but it needs to be animated for them to become aurally interested in the offer. I have visited so many nurseries with expensive outdoor musical installations, which staff report to me are never played, for exactly this reason. The children have already explored the timbre of them, and need the interaction modelled for them to find the learning within it. The same learning can be achieved better by a temporary layout of even cheap or damaged sound-makers. One of the best instrument sessions I have seen involved a circle of empty mayonnaise buckets and some claves, because the possibilities for exploring them were endless: patterning between tapping the buckets, varying the layout, running between buckets, playing together, rhythmic copying, carrying them around and so forth.
It could be beneficial to have a specialist musician in the setting to contribute this animation to the musical offering. By animating the sound-makers to create interactions, the musician would empower the children to lead with their playing, and demonstrate – to children and staff – how to continue when they are not there. In music sessions I've witnessed, a frequent barrier to EYPs leading these is that they ‘don't play an instrument’ or were ‘told they can't sing’. By modelling simple interactions with the children (e.g. on percussion), keeping speaking to a minimum and carefully copying the children to empower their leadership, however, the musician would be leaving the EYPs with another musical opportunity that is well within their grasp. It would also increase the status of instrument play.
Music in the fabric of the curriculum
An inspirational EYP I once worked with described the way we worked together musically as ‘the thread which holds the whole of my curriculum together’. Music is one of the most inclusive ways of interacting with early years children – pastoral instructions are often sung or played on an instrument as the music creates a different type of listening. Singing together is enormously good for wellbeing, particularly in transitioning from parents and learning to interact socially. It is also one of the most efficient ways to cover huge amounts of the early years curriculum – a single song can teach knowledge of the world, language, aid memory, afford more repetition without getting bored, engage both fine and gross motor skills, and increase confidence. Moreover, developing all these skills in one activity creates more neural pathways.
In the same way, embedding music in all areas of the classroom can allow an aural dimension to the children's free-play learning and increase creativity and understanding. This could include adding a rain stick and thunder drum, laid out with toy animals and props, when learning about the rainforest in your small-world area; adding rainbow chime bars, to wooden blocks and numicon, when thinking about patterning in the maths area; or, in the construction area, using egg shakers hidden inside towers, adding to the narrative of what is being built as well as the excitement when these fall down!
Responding to recorded music is also a wonderful activity to heighten creativity in free play. Rather than using it as background, provide a framework where children can respond in different ways; good examples are playing along with percussion instruments, maybe to some samba music to tie in with a celebrations theme; dancing with scarves; or, my favourite, free mark-making to music. This last activity is enormously collaborative, and its emphasis on process rather than finished product encourages children to engage who don't normally mark-make. The choice of music could tie into the current topic, the children's interests, or indeed the staff 's taste – everything is valid.
By creating these activities, we as practitioners enable the children to take up aural and musical opportunities to learn across the curriculum. In my opinion, the expertise of the visiting music practitioner would be invaluable in noticing musical behaviour and helping staff to set up activities like these in the planning of the classroom.
Why circle time at all?
You may be thinking that I am denigrating a group music time as of less value than interactions in free play, and that I am saying it would be of more benefit for a musician only to visit to play with the children. This isn't the case: I think group time is essential for the musician to provide inspiration – the raw material for the children to take into their play – and to create those neural pathways from multi-tasking. The best experiences in my career have been when I am truly involved in the nursery – leading group times then supporting the children and staff in their play, speaking to key staff about my observations of musicality, even being involved in the planning so that the musical skills or topics can be of most benefit to the children's understanding. I hope that this can become best practice for any regularly visiting musician to help each setting to embed music into the fabric of the way the children learn.
