Using music in Early Years
A project to encourage young children's responses to music found that ICT could help. Nursery nurse Helen Newman from Sanday Community School Nursery explains.
I've found many good resources to support the teaching and delivery of practical music making with children within the early years setting. However, encouraging children to 'listen and respond to sounds, rhythm, songs and a variety of music' posed a professional dilemma:
- the children's relatively short attention span makes them easily distracted
- their language and their vocabulary seemed insufficiently developed for them to express their responses to music.
The result – frustration for both the children and myself!
I then heard composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies explaining the difficulties people have listening to unfamiliar musical genres. In his experience, people were far more receptive to music when it was presented as an integral part of a visual drama, eg a film, or music theatre. In this context people were able to accept quite extreme musical ideas.
Computer visualisations
This reminded me of being totally enthralled by Windows Media Player® visualisations – a program which accompanies music played through a computer and which randomly produces a wide range of moving graphics that are linked to the graphic equaliser. It produces beautiful shapes, patterns and colours and I was amazed at the profound effect this had upon me.
I resolved to experiment with the idea of presenting music to children using Windows Media Player® visualisations in order to heighten their experience. I decided to use Maxwell's Reel, with Northern Lights, a piece composed by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies after seeing the Northern Lights, which seemed to fit the bill perfectly!
Due to the logistical problems of gathering a group of children round one small laptop computer, I decided to show the visualisations in a large, darkened room by connecting the computer to a digital projector and an amplifier. The lights were dimmed, and the music, accompanied by the visualisations, was played so that the sounds and moving images filled the hall.
The effects were staggering – after a few initial 'Oohs' and 'Ahhs' one child exclaimed 'I want to get in it!' and another added 'Can we dance?' The children jumped up and proceeded to dance wildly. They reached up to try to touch the visualisations and remained engaged for the full 10 minutes and 58 seconds of the piece. As the children's noise level increased we turned up the volume of the music accordingly – we didn't want to restrict their freedom of expression.
Reggio Emilia
Taking the lead from Loris Malaguzzi (the founder of the Reggio Emilia schools in Northern Italy) our approach was based upon using our prior knowledge of the child and then listening and observing and responding to the whole range of expressive languages with which children use to communicate. I made a conscious decision to refrain from asking children to explain or describe their ideas or actions. The only pre-planned activity was to offer the children the opportunity to create their own giant Northern Lights painting.
From this developed a wide variety of activities, all undertaken with the music being played in the background: chalk pictures; collages; felt-pen drawings; dancing with coloured ribbons; light pictures using an overhead projector and Cellophane; large group wall collages; paint program on the interactive whiteboard and story telling.
In the initial stages it was obvious that the children were having great fun experimenting with the wide variety of media but it was not until one small girl called me over to see her collage that I had evidence of direct links between what the children were producing and the music they were hearing.
'Look. That big circle is the loud bits, the strawy stuff is the dancy bit and this bit is the quiet.' (Points to the border.) 'But the bit I like the best is that tiny quiet star!'
As the project progressed it became apparent that even at this early age children displayed distinct preferences for the medium through which to express themselves. Most noticeably I found that those children who tend to shy away from the 'messy' painting and gluing activities, or who do not usually choose to express themselves creatively, were drawn towards the activities using ICT.
I felt that there could have been several possible explanations for this:
- They were 'cleaner' activities
- The technical aspect of simultaneously producing an image on both the interactive whiteboard and laptop screen was fascinating for many children
- The children could almost 'get inside' and be a part of their own artwork
- Any errors could be totally wiped out
- In this instance, the use of the whiteboard also appeared to encourage expression that was focused upon exploring colour and pattern rather than developing and relying upon representational images
- Children with lesser-developed fine motor skills found working on a large scale fulfilling
- Using a paint program within which large blocks of colour could be produced instantaneously at the touch of a hand rather than through much effort and perseverance gave immediate satisfaction and impressive results.
For many of the children it seemed almost as if working through a variety of media not only gave them time to internalise and formulate their ideas but also opened up the channels of imaginative expression, which they could then translate into creative verbal responses.
'Silver is the gentle bit, brown bits are twinkling. It's happy party music. The black dots are people dancing. Orange is people crying because they banged their heads on a wall.'
'It's a cloud of dust imagining the spots. The spots are what the clouds are imagining a magic witch would say to a cross magic wizard.'
The project culminated in a session during which the children created an imaginative story whilst listening to the music. This final activity clearly displayed that the children not only possessed the language skills to express their extremely imaginative creative ideas about the music (disproving my earlier impressions) but that they were also able to recognise and express distinct and sometimes quite complex concepts regarding musical style, form and timbre.
The results of this project have convinced me of the benefits of using ICT to stimulate creativity. Using ICT in conjunction with traditional media not only encouraged the children to form links between different activities and ideas but also had an immense impact upon developing their creative skills and confidence when encouraged to 'listen and respond to sounds, rhythm, songs and a variety of music'.
Helen Newman
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