As we have seen (page 16), early years settings may choose to plan children's musical activities around four categories - voices, instruments, recorded music and dance. But what is developmentally appropriate for a young child? And what support do practitioners need to give to promote that musical development?
Giving stages and ages of musical development is difficult, since children live in different environments and progress individually. There is also a growing realisation that younger children are far more competent than they were given credit for in the past. However, some sense of how children will develop musically is useful to inform planning.
LISTENING
Babies are listening to voices and sounds, including music, before they are even born. If awake and content, they will quieten and become alert when listening to their mother's voice or familiar music. They have fine discrimination skills and can respond to the smallest changes in tone, phrasing, pitch and rhythm.
Toddlers enjoy listening to live and recorded music, and will show a movement response, typically bouncing rhythmically from the knees or gyrating around and around.
Older children will want to choose the music they listen to and will get to know selections of CDs or tapes. They may enjoy singing or playing along to music. It's important not to underestimate children's ability to be aurally alert and discriminating, but they will need to learn a vocabulary to describe what they hear.
Support and encouragement
* Create good conditions for listening. Early years settings can be surprisingly noisy places. Are there any quiet places and/or quiet times in your setting?
* Model a listening attentiveness, perhaps in an exaggerated way with your head cocked and a hand to the ear and with older children, say, 'We're listening carefully, aren't we?' If someone is listening well there are no outward signs, except perhaps stillness and concentration.
* Talk about the music with children and introduce a consistent vocabulary for musical characteristics, for example, 'We are playing this very fast, aren't we?', or 'Listen to these squeaky little sounds'.
USING VOICES
Babies use their voices very expressively - every gurgle has a particular rise and fall. If alone and content, they play vocal games and babble to themselves.
Toddlers like to join in with rhymes and may pick up a repetitive syllable or some small phrase. If adults have sung to young children, they will pick up snippets of the songs and sing them. They will also vocalise freely as they play - a kind of voice track - when they play alone. Their more energetic, whole body movements are also often accompanied by vocalisations that match the quality, tempo and rhythm of their movements.
Older children will improvise vocally as a natural part of play. They will also:
* chant to accompany whole body play and perhaps play with others.
* engage in vocal tracking during solitary play with objects. This is a kind of singing out loud. For example, a child might sing 'The train is going through the tunnel, going through the tunnel' and accompany it with sound effects of 'choo, choo, choo'.
* sing story songs, a kind of singing 'role play'.
* make up new versions and variations on songs they already know.
Although children can hear pitch variations very perceptively, they lack the vocabulary to describe what they hear and may describe pitch differences as 'big and little', or as 'loud and soft'.
Support and encouragement
* Provide an environment in which singing is valued. Practitioners may have a deep-seated fear of singing, but making the nursery a place where people sing freely will go a long way to encouraging children to join in.
* Listen for children's own made-up songs and comment on them. A comment such as 'I heard you singing a nice song while you played with the bricks' will add value to what can be a lost strand of musical activity.
Supporting children's songs
* Encourage children's learning by singing step-by-step. Most of the usual nursery songs are too demanding for young children to sing. They need to learn to use their voices step-by-step, starting with manageable tasks and then progressing.
* Choose simple songs, ones with a few, catchy words and a simple tune that doesn't span too many notes.
* Keep the speed (tempo) quite slow.
* Don't expect the children to sing with any volume. Asking them to 'sing up' will only produce a raucous sound.
USING INSTRUMENTS
Babies will swipe at hanging toys and, once they can grasp, will bang and shake sound-makers. They often shake and bang in a regular rhythmic movement.
Toddlers continue to be interested in sound-making objects, exploiting all the possibilities for making sounds from them, including bashing them on teeth!
Older children will play with instruments in a variety of ways. What may seem random, chaotic play, will be underpinned by certain forms of organisation -perhaps the child is playing up each bar of the xylophone in turn, or half singing and playing 'Twinkle, twinkle little star', or making up a dance with a tambourine and circling around, or playing in turns with a partner. Careful observation will often reveal the way in which the child is understanding their own music-making.
Support and encouragement
* Provide instruments with play potential and set them out in ways that will encourage the children to engage in a variety of activities.
* Listen to the children and comment in a way that shows you are listening. For example, 'I'm listening to your tune on the glockenspiel. I can hear that you are playing very, very quietly.' * Join in with children and play the instruments with them. A 'taking-turns-to-play' game works well.
MOVING TO MUSIC
Babies will make rhythmic gestures to correspond to the phrasing of songs sung to them, and as they become more physically independent, will respond with rhythmic movements to music.
Toddlers enjoy bouncing and jumping on the spot to music, or doing a kind of 'lopsided gallop', often in circles. They will pick up the general quality and tempo of the music and will be able to respond to simple modelled movements, such as everyone touching the floor and jumping up again.
Older children can perform simple locomotor movements such as marching, jogging and galloping in time to music. As they get older, they will be able to do a variety of clapping and tapping movements with songs and rhymes of increasing complexity and with increasing independence.
Support and encouragement
* Provide spaces and live (songs, instruments) or recorded music.
* Model movements and join in with the children as they move. Take care that the children are able to do the movements that you model for them. Very often the children need to do things at a quicker speed than would be comfortable for the adult - it stands to reason, the children are smaller!
* Observe and comment, for example, 'I'm enjoying watching you dance around to the song Leila is singing for you.'
