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Music Explorations to Try!
Adapted from an article in
“Explorations with Young Children”
by Nina Jaffe
Exercises can provide a format for developing
musical concepts with children, and can help you free your
own musical imagination. Body movement and visual materials
can be integrated for a natural way to engage young children
in musical learning.
Try these exercises and adapt them or create
new ones. Keep a written record of what you do. Soon you will
have a wealth of musical activities and ideas that can be
implemented and enriched throughout the year.
- Think of an experience in your early life
that was connected to music. Write it down as a story and
share it with your colleagues.
- Talk with families about their musical
traditions. Invite family members to bring in tapes or play
music for the children.
- Develop a resource file of songs, games,
and musical ideas. You may wish to divide them into categories,
such as, animal songs, holiday songs, fingerplays, lullabies,
circle time songs, etc.
- Get together with friends or colleagues
and play music together. Informal music making can be done
with the help of song books, simple instruments, and recordings.
- Create a score with invented notation.
Here is a way to do it:
Materials: Recording of an orchestral piece,
such as Handel’s Water Music, or another multitextured, flowing
composition. Large newsprint, crayons, school-owned or class-made
instruments.
Warm up: Find a comfortable place to sit.
Put on the recording, close your eyes, and imagine what pictures
the music is “painting.” Stop the music and draw the scenes
you have imagined.
Development: Following the warm-up, or on
another day, play the music again. This time, listen for instances
when the music is going up and when it is going down. “Draw”
the lines you are hearing with hand gestures, in the air.
Then take out the newsprint and crayons
to create a musical score, or “map” using any design you choose.
(If you wish, you can look at an example of a modern musical
score. Murray Shaefer’s Creative Music Teaching has sample
invented scores and further ideas.)
Designs can show variations in pitch or
beginnings and endings for various instruments, or they can
tell a story with sound. Lines, squiggles, dots, and dashes
are all valid. The basic concepts are that music can be represented
visually and that there are many ways of representing it.
One of the reasons music is written down is so that it can
be played again, a point you may wish to discuss with children.
Practice playing your score with instruments.
Share your work with your class or colleagues.
For classroom use, scores can be displayed or kept in a special
"music composition file," similar to a file for stories or
journals.
About the Author
Nina Jaffe is an award-winning author, folklorist, storyteller,
and arts educator who is on the graduate faculty at Bank Street
College of Education. Her acclaimed retellings of world folklore
include The Way Meat Loves Salt: A Cinderella Tale from the
Jewish Tradition and Patakín: World Tales of Drums and Drummers.
She shares stories and music with audiences in schools, conferences,
and festivals throughout the United States and abroad.
Book links:
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