Music in Children's School Lives

  
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1. Music in the curriculum
2. Musical Composition in the Classroom
3. Teaching Music Literacy, Creativity, & Performance
4. Re-Search into Children's Musical Knowledge
5. Newsletter Information

 
Music in the curriculum

Christmas concerts are over and teachers have some time to catch their breath before Music Festival preparations start. This seemed like a good time to devote an issue of the Early Childhood Newsletter to some thoughts about music and its place in the curriculum.
The June, 1996 issue of Saturday Night published an article by Kenneth Whyte entitled “Why Johnny can’t sing.” Whyte recognizes that more and more Canadian schools are eliminating music and replacing it with additional science, computing and “life skills.” Whyte argues that “Aside from being one of the highest manifestations of human intelligence, music is the most scientific of the arts, relying for its best effects on mathematical knowledge of pitch, duration, the weight and measures of strings, the bore of pipe.” He reminds us that Pythagoras, and other early theoreticians, considered music to be a mathematical discipline.

Whyte cites a recent study done at the University of California, Irvine, which found that music can improve children’s spatial reasoning. However, he is quick to point out that, more importantly, music offers enjoyment, helps children explore and cultivate emotions, gives them another form of expression, and provides opportunity to learn the value of practice, discipline and collaboration. He says, “It (music) provides perhaps the best chance a student will have of meeting grace and beauty in school.”
What does all this mean for us and for our classroom practice? This is one of the questions we are asking, in collaboration with the provincial department of education. During the current school year we are working with musicians, music educators, education students, and early childhood specialists, to explore ways of making music a vehicle through which curricular concepts can be taught, and children can communicate.

This issue contains contributions from an early childhood professor, classroom teachers, music consultants, education students and the children with whom they work. It is meant to help teachers reflect on the current role that music plays in their classroom and to provide some ideas and resources for further work in this important area.

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Musical Composition in the Classroom

Teaching Music Literacy, Creativity, & Performance

Re-Search into Children's Musical Knowledge

Last spring I spent a day with Midge Leavitt, who was then Early Childhood Consultant at the Department of Education. We were reviewing the New Brunswick Kindergarten Curriculum Document Young Children Learning. Midge and I were engaged in this review as part of our ongoing work with other members of the Kindergarten Curriculum Advisory Committee of the New Brunswick Department of Education. As we read our way through what is a carefully written document, we realized that there were only a few curricular suggestions related to music in the kindergarten classroom. With this curricular gap in mind one of our aims at the Early Childhood Centre this year is to research aspects of music in the classroom with the overall goal of suggesting curricular additions for the kindergarten curriculum document.

The following teaching story has been retold by Sherrie-Lynn Butt from her field journal, a journal that she kept as part of her work in a university course I teach entitled Senior Seminar in the Early Years. Sherrie-Lynn is from Cornerbrook, Newfoundland. Her mom, a long time chorister with her church, says Sherrie-Lynn learned to sing before she could talk, and to read music before she could read books. Sherrie-Lynn has a long history of choral, piano, organ and percussion theory and practice.

Sherrie-Lynn is at UNB doing a joint degree in philosophy and education. When I met with her about the goals of her project for this course, we set up a situation that would bring together her expertise in music and her sense of philosophical inquiry as a way to address the musical gaps in the kindergarten curriculum. Over a three month period Sherrie-Lynn worked with a group of five and six year old children in the UNB Primary classroom (K-1) where Midge Leavitt is now the teacher. Every Wednesday morning, Sherrie-Lynn set up a music centre in the classroom where percussion instruments became the means for her to work with children’s musical understandings. She was answering her own philosophical and curricular question: “how do I elicit and elaborate upon children’s musical understandings in the classroom setting?”

As Sherrie-Lynn and I considered how her research fit with current curricular outcomes in music, we contacted Gervais Warren at the Department of Education for the most recent curriculum guide. Revised Music Curriculum outcomes for kindergarten to grade eight were completed in June and two copies of the document were sent to each school in the province. Copies are also available at Instructional Resources in Fredericton, 453-2319.

Spontaneous Conducting with Serious Intent
Sherrie-Lynn Butt, UNB Education Student
The session that is the focus of this revised journal entry was my work at the music centre on November 20, 1996. During the previous 10 music centre sessions, the children and I had been playing percussion instruments together. Some of these instruments were tone bars, hand held drums, tambourines, claves, sleigh bells, and xylophone. We played with the sound by layering the differently textured sounds of a variety of instruments through simple rhythm play. For example, I would count quarter notes out loud, play eighth notes with claves (thick wooden sticks) while marching, and the students would add their rhythms to my music as we invented our own group composition. During this performing time, some children would play, then stop to hear what other rhythms were being made around them. Other children were listening to all the instruments and playing their own simultaneously. This group mingling is what I refer to as being “interactive improvisation”.

My plan for children participating in the music centre on November 20th was to have the group sing and play instruments together. This did happen, but with an interesting twist. As we opened the centre, my explanations of the activity turned into a discussion on what songs we would sing and which percussion instruments we would use as accompaniment. As children began to express different opinions on possible performance selections, we were in conflict over which of the familiar tunes we would sing and play. The children looked to me for a solution. Being the only “grown-up” in the group, it was supposedly my job to fix the controversy. Of course, one of my enlightened aims was to have the children problem solve as I have observed them do in other activity centres. Bess’s solution was to take control of the group herself. “We need a `reductor’!,” she said. Bess laid down her tambourine and picked up a blue clave. She stood under the song chart where the words to the songs the children had been learning with Midge and with Joanne Lennahan, the French teacher were written out on experience chart paper. She conducted us by waving the heavy blue baton back and forth in 2/4 time and singing. We, the musicians, were settling in our places like an ensemble of performers who have just taken the stage; tuning our instruments and chatting with our neighbors. We were unaware she wanted to begin. To signify the beginning of the music, she spoke out in a very loud and clear voice to get our attention. “When I point this at you,” she said, shaking the baton “it is YOUR TURN. When I point it away from you, you have to STOP and it is someone else’s turn.” Having a turn meant that when Bess pointed to you, you sang and played, solo. As musicians we had to pay close attention to the performer playing because one of us might have to pick up at any minute. This reminded me of what conductors do when taking the reins of a large unruly group of musicians - an experience I have lived. A glaring look with narrowing eyes and the baton aimed at the person who was to play. For those few moments, Bess was THE conductor.
When it was Hannah’s turn to conduct, she chose “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.” My sense of her conducting was that she hoped to improve upon Bess’ method by having me carry the tune. To carry the tune I had to sing and play the xylophone continually. She chose when the other children would participate and brought them into the music by pointing just as Bess had done. The pointing and solo work was a suitable conducting method, while someone was there to keep the melody going.

“Jingle Bells” was Sara’s choice. I asked how she would be conducting. She thought for a moment and instructed, “You all have to play together and keep going until you make a mistake. Then I will make you stop like this.” dropping her arms. Many band practices that I have attended proceed in this way. We play until we encounter problems which need additional practice. Sara thought the music should continue as long as it sounded good. We played and sang through Jingle Bells twice, without major errors. Thus she solved the difficulties we had experienced when we were previously conducted to stop and start in mid-musical-phrase.

When Natalie’s turn came, she chose the popular dance tune Maccarena. As she prepared to conduct, she asked us to put down our instruments and dance with her instead of playing. So we moved from conducting to choreography. Natalie lead the dance by example, modeling the steps and actions for us. She asked me to write down her song on the experience chart where the other songs were recorded. During one section of the song when the group was fumbling through the words, she stopped the activity “Hold it! I’ll just put on the tape!” She marched over to the tape player and put a tape in. Country tunes. She had intended for us to hear the song and be able to sing it from that exposure. Her way of solving the problem was to check with the original version. As many conductors and choreographers do, she may well have been hearing the music in her head. Often it is from the music heard in the head that conductors set goals which become performance expectations. It is through the skill of musicians that conductors hope to meet their expectations. Precisely what Natalie was trying to do!

What Might This All Mean?
Pam Whitty
So much music was happening during this spontaneous conducting play. Students sang and accompanied a variety of familiar tunes with percussion instruments. As they sang the songs, they were matching their voices to the xylophone Sherrie-Lynn played, and to one another’s voices and matching rhythms and tempos to the music. They were also cooperating as they worked in a group of seven, creating their own conducting style and patiently attending to other conductors, and eventually a choreographer, and her instructions. As teachers we have the potential to learn as well when we match our pedagogical knowledge with children’s understandings.

This carefully re-thought teaching story from Sherrie-Lynn’s field notes is one of many examples from Sherrie-Lynn’s work, work that illuminates children’s musical understandings and the importance of teacher as reflective practitioner. As I worked with Sherrie-Lynn I was struck by how her musical understanding allowed her to help the children name their musical experiences. She also helped me as a non-music specialist, to see the musical understanding that children brought with them to the classroom. Just as children bring their own explicit and implicit knowledge of the reading and writing processes to the classroom so too they bring their explicit and implicit musical understanding from their homes and the worlds in which we all live. For me Sherrie-Lynn’s teaching and research point out dramatically the serious business of children’s play, in this case with things musical. This work also demonstrates the need for people with musical knowledge, skills and language to work with children in small groups to provide them with opportunities to represent and communicate their understanding of the world - opportunities that explicitly enact the all important literacy of music.

After we read through the outcomes we called Gervais for some background into the department’s work in this area. We learned that the aim of the document is to describe a good solid music program. Rather than writing the outcomes for the classroom teacher or the music specialist, the focus was on what musical sense and skills children ought to have at particular points in their schooling. As Gervais said, and as you will notice when you read the outcomes, some lend themselves to specialist instruction and other outcomes can be more easily integrated into curriculum by the classroom teacher. Some of the outcomes may be met through standard performances such as music festival and seasonal concerts. Other outcomes are based in music making of a less formal nature than public performance as well as musical literacy and cultural aspects of music. In the next and final piece of this article Sherrie-Lynn re-searches the music curriculum document and fits together her teaching practice and classroom research with the curricular outcomes. She begins with a look at this particular session described above and then draws other examples from across the twelve week period.

Linking Children’s Musical Understandings with Music Outcomes -
Sherrie-Lynn Butt
To quote from the music outcomes guide this document "identifies the important skills, attitudes and knowledge that students must demonstrate at the end of Grades 2, 5, and 8." The music curriculum offers a comprehensive developmental program through four components. These components include: music literacy, the ability to read and write; music-making, the demonstration of musical awareness in a variety of music making activities; responding to music, awareness of the expressive qualities of music; and music and culture, an awareness of the role of music in society past and present. During this conducting session the children gave evidence of music literacy through their ability to play short melodies within the range of a third. For, music making, the music outcomes included: singing a variety of repertoire with appropriate expression and style, demonstrating the ability to match pitch vocally, demonstrating cooperation and teamwork skills in musical activities, and the creation of rhythmic and melodic ostinato to accompany songs and movement. Category three, responding to music includes: listening attentively to a variety of music, recognition of changes in tempo, dynamics and instrumentation, recognition by sight and sound of commonly used instruments in the classroom, and responding to music’s mood and style through appropriate movement. Finally in the category of music and culture the spontaneous conducting play amply demonstrated the knowledge that these children brought to school about the culture of conducting.

Evidence of other music outcomes that the children were engaged in during the twelve week period include: music literacy, the ability to play short melodies within a range of a third. Bess noticed the colours and letters pasted on the xylophone keys. Starting on the lowest note, which was C, she played and sang the tones of an ascending C scale. “C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C-D-... that sounds like the deer song,” she said, and proceeded to sing “Do-Re-Me-Fa... That is what Mrs. Scheme, the music teacher, sang for us. Do, a deer. A female deer....” She sang the song while hitting the appropriate degree of the scale. On another day, after Hannah and I had finished arranging a composition of Midge’s called “Hello, Hello!”, Sara sat at the xylophone and started looking at the music we had tacked to the wall. She read the notes one at a time and hit the appropriate key. While she sang the name of the note she played, I sang the words very slowly. Sara was making the connection between the note names, xylophone keys, and words of the song.

Music making and specifically musical awareness by singing a variety of repertoire with appropriate expression, the ability to match pitch, operation and teamwork skills in musical activities and the creation of rhythmic and melodic ostinati (repetition of musical phrase or other pattern) to accompany songs and movement occurred every week. I draw from the example of Paul, who usually visited the music centre. He enjoyed playing the drum and remembering his favorite rhythms from week to week. Some of the students enjoyed dancing while he played a sixteenth-eighth note pattern which they associated with aboriginal drumming. Others joined in by playing the exact rhythm on another instrument.

Responding to music, that is listening attentively to a variety of music, demonstrating appropriate listening behaviors for live and recorded music, the recognition of changes in tempo, dynamics and instrumentation, recognition by sight and sound commonly used instruments in the classroom, responding to music’s mood and style through appropriate movement, and the explanation using simple musical terms of responses to live and recorded music can be seen through Natalie’s love of CATS by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Natalie brought a listening tape to the classroom with instrumentals from the musical  “CATS”. She sang along, and added words to the music. She also danced in circles around the music centre, changing her steps and spinning to match the different sounds of the music. In another instance, during an interview about music and instruments she likes, Alex commented “I like the guitar and drums in Alanis Morissette songs. And I like the drums the best. My Mom plays the drums. We have a drum set at home because she used to play in a band when I was real little. I like to play your drum the best. The one you bring in here.”

Finally in the category music and culture, I go beyond my weekly session to the other musical opportunities presented in the classroom. Midge sings with the children everyday, songs that range from traditional folk songs arranged by people like Ruth Crawford Seeger to ones that she composes herself. Movement activities in the gym are often inspired by music. Polly Scheme, the music teacher, works with children once weekly for a thirty minute period doing musical activities that range across all these categories.

In all of these ways the children demonstrate an awareness of the role of music in society as they listen and learn to music from various eras and of various styles.

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Newsletter Information

Editors: Anne Hunt, Pam Nason and Pam Whitty