BEFORE GETTING STARTED
Look again at Part 1 (Nursery World, 26 June, p16) to remind yourself about planning a session, and during the session, avoid saying 'noise' (it suggests pain!) and use instead the word 'sound'.
THE SESSION
Part 1. Warming up
- Ask the children to move about the room, using their bodies to make the sounds. 'Stamp your feet loudly around the room. Use the whole of your foot as you stamp down on to the ground.' 'Tiptoe around the room. Walk as lightly as you can. How quiet can you be?' 'As you stride about the room, make a sound with your voice every time your foot hits the ground.' This last movement is complicated and children will need to have lots of experience of making sounds while stationary and then doing two things at the same time with their body.
Part 2. The main teaching session
- Ensure you know what you want to teach and how it links to the last lesson. For example: to enable children to interpret various rhythms; or, to appreciate different genre of music and to translate this into a movement.
- On a tambour, tap out a series of rhythms:
- a steady (crotchet) rhythm and ask the children to walk to the rhythm
- a slightly faster (quaver) rhythm and ask the children to run lightly
- a rhythm alternating short and long beats (dotted quaver and quaver), and ask the children to skip.
Be sure to praise the children when their movements are in time to the rhythm.
- Next, ask the children to listen to the tambour and respond accordingly, without you telling them how to move - so simply tap out the rhythm and change as you want. You can add jumping, accompanied by a very slow beat, and hopping, using a slightly faster beat.
- Finally, use pieces of music to either suggest a movement or, if children are secure enough, to let them make their own movements and respond in their own way, which they can discuss and draw later.
This is a time when children can move with their whole bodies on the floor, using their hands and feet at the same time, moving on their bottoms, stomachs and so on.
For this part of the session, use a piano if you play. Otherwise, use taped music, but you will need to have children who are really secure with these music sessions. Avoid using commercial tapes, as they leave you unable to respond to your individual children. Instead, tape extracts from a range of music - for example, Glen Miller's 'In the Mood', Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf', Holst's 'The Planets', and Tchaikovsky's 'Nutcracker Suite'. Explore what's available, as there is so much beautiful music to choose from.
Part 3. Warm down
- Using instruments, ask the children to float around the room to the sound of the rainmaker, jitter about to the bells, and finally lie down to the sound of, say, Pachelbel's 'Canon'.
An alternative warm-down could be a sound story:
'Helen ran to
The front door
Slipped on a mat
And fell in a puddle'
Ask the children to act it out using a different instrument for each movement - run, slip and fall and then stop.
- Helen Bilton is the author of several books on outdoor play for the early years and PGCE programme director at the University of Reading.
