Music – Take note

I am no musician. So, when I first arrived at Newlands Spring Primary School, in Chelmsford, a small part of me died inside when I heard that my class of 30 four- to five-year-olds would have a 30-minute violin lesson every Monday morning.

Why, I wondered, would any senior leadership team put me through this? And what use was a violin lesson to a four-year-old? Most of these children couldn’t read and write their own name, never mind read musical notation or create their own.

Like most early years practitioners, I had read, and been told, about the importance of music to early learning. So, I had always tried to embed music in my practice, singing lots of nursery rhymes and giving children regular access to musical instruments.

Yet, when a C or F# sounds like a bad grade – rather than a musical note – finding the enthusiasm to really embrace music is a challenge.

You need to feel, see and experience a musical curriculum first hand to become a true believer, and thanks to the violin lessons, along with a CPD project, I have been converted.

MUSIC INITIATIVES

Violin lessons

The violin lessons are led by a Stave House-trained musician and teach the children to read, write and play music. The children learn musical notation through storytelling, games and songs. Each note is a character, like Ferdie the Fox for ‘F’ and Father Crotchet for a single beat. As the Stave House method is accredited and certified by the London College of Music, children also achieve recognised music certificates.

Ruth Travers, a Montessori-trained and passionate musician, created the Stave House methodology out of frustration with music sessions that simply involve adult-chosen songs and fail to teach musical skills or enable children to engage in their own music-making.

Through her approach, she wants to give children ‘an experience of the real thing… to become independent and confident when playing, reading or creating music… to level the playing field for those who got access to high-quality music lessons.’

When we spoke, she was exited to tell me about the recent launch of the Stave House baby-and-toddler programme. For a one-time payment of £5, the programme can be followed by anyone who wants to enjoy the benefits of music with their child.

Stave House songs and stories are cheerful and memorable; like modern nursery rhymes, they weave their way into your subconscious, creating a tapestry of musical knowledge that is difficult to forget. It was a pleasant surprise too to find that the methodology can slip seamlessly into children’s play or learning environment. Indeed, the children can walk like ‘Father Crochet’ to the hall or travel across the playground like the ‘Quaver Twins’.

The School Readiness through Musicianship Project

The violin lessons coincided with my school becoming part of the School Readiness through Musicianship Project, a research project supported through Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Teacher Development Fund. The fund aims to support effective arts-based teaching and learning and to embed learning through the arts in the primary curriculum by helping teachers and school leaders to develop the necessary skills, knowledge, confidence and experience.

A MUSICAL CURRICULUM

The two initiatives meant music became a part of daily classroom life, so we:

• would create a ‘rhythm of the day’ each morning. For this, the children would select the notation (quavers and crochets) and decide on their order, creating the rhythm they had to listen out for if the teacher wanted their attention
• provided a wider range of musical instruments within our continuous provision, including pitch instruments such as a xylophone
• created a whole music topic entitled ‘Where does sound come from?’, giving the children time to explore how music can be created by themselves, toys and instruments
• arranged for a variety of musicians to play an instrument for the class, thereby exposing them to a wide range of music genres (the musicians were often parents, siblings or music teachers from the school)
• dismantled instruments, such as removing a piano’s casing and then putting it back together so we could find out how it worked
• would play music as the children arrived and settled, followed by questions such as ‘What could you hear/feel?’ and ‘Did you like that piece of music?’
• told music-related stories such as Ed Vere’s Mr Big, Peace at Lastby Jill Murphy and ‘Peter and the Wolf’.
• explored and discussed the different parts of an orchestra in turn.

Working so closely with Stave House and the School Readiness through Musicianship Project deeply influenced my practice. Inspired by tangible, positive change in my class, the children and I created a musical curriculum together.

Rather than squeezing it in, I gave music more time, and the effect was near-instant.

BENEFITS

Children’s enhanced exposure to music and music-making has brought benefits to many aspects of learning, including:

Phonetics I believe the children’s progress in phonetics was down to the powerful phonological awareness they developed in their music lessons – if you can hear the difference between notes, you can hear the difference between letter sounds.

Mathematics The children’s ability to count, identify and create patterns improved.

Communication and language skills One of the tools we used to support us in the research project was Musical Development Matters(MDM), modelled on the EYFS Development Matters guidance. We found that some children scored much lower on MDM than on the Development Matters indicators.

The majority of these children had speech and language problems and, on investigation, we discovered that most had missed vital developmental steps, such as playing with music or creating sounds. By giving the children time to explore these musical development stages, it was possible to narrow the learning gap and allow those children to catch up with their peers.

Emotional development and self-regulation I am aware music can be incredibly emotive, but I had not considered how music can help a child develop emotional maturity and self-regulation. Music requires children to maintain focus, to memorise, to wait for cues and anticipate what is going to happen next, all skills linked to self-regulation and executive function.

Showing respect for other people’s musical preferences or registering the different emotions in a piece of music can promote the children’s expressive and creative understanding. The children started to request their favourite pieces to listen to, such as ‘the violins one’ (Four Seasons by Vivaldi). Interestingly, when asked why they enjoyed this, their responses ranged from ‘It’s what we play’ to ‘It makes me feel lots’.

ON A POSITIVE NOTE

With the many expectations on us as practitioners, it can sometimes be easy to forget that we are facilitators of learning opportunities; that we do not have to be experts. By removing the ‘expert expectation’ we remove the ‘fear factor’, making room to craft with the children creative curricula that are outside our own comfort zones and modelling how to take risks and overcome challenges. So, with that said, we should follow Fred Astaire’s example, ‘Let’s face the music and dance.’

EXPERT OPINIONS

A rich music environment

Violin lessons for very young children can be controversial as they are often viewed as overly formal instruction for this age group. However, within the context of our school, early years consultant and musician Marjorie Ouvry applauds the initiative and school’s music-rich environment.

‘It is a wonderful opportunity that these children are getting to experience so much music. The point of these schemes is to encourage a love of music. The violin is a vehicle to drive that enjoyment, playing the violin is not an end in itself,’ she says.

Communication and language

The boost to children’s language skills came as no surprise to Musical Development Matters author Nicola Burke. ‘I am not surprised,’ she says. ‘Music is a crucial and intrinsic part of communication development. When you look at the speech and language pyramid often referred to by speech and language therapists, you can see that music plays an important role in all of the areas of the pyramid.

‘We need to have an open view of what music is and can be, in order to provide meaningful music provision.’

MORE INFORMATION

• https://stavehouse.co.uk
• Paul Hamlyn Foundation, www.phf.org.uk/funds/tdf
• The School Readiness through Musicianship Project involves Chelmsford Teaching Schools Alliance in partnership with Essex Music Services and London Music Masters, adminctsa@newlandsspring.essex.sch.uk
• Sounds Like Playing: Music and the early years curriculum by Marjorie Ouvry
• Musical Development Matters, https://bit.ly/2Pq0iAw