Is your primary school’s Music department fit for purpose?Take my quiz, add your score and see how you do!  It is very ambitious.  Almost no school will get the gold unless they are an all-through school in both Primary and Secondary phases.

Bronze Award

Does your school have concerts and recitals annually? (5 points)

Does your school have a musical play annually? (5 points)

Does your school have a choir? (5 points)

Does your school have an instrumental ensemble? (5 points)

Does your school have instrumental tutors coming into school? (5 points)

Does your school have an annual music trip somewhere local? (5 points)

Does your school teach recorders or ukuleles as a whole class? (5 points)

Do children sing outside of music lessons in their classtime? (5 points)

Do you have a wide selection of untuned classroom percussion instruments? (5 points)

Do you have some tuned classroom percussion instruments? (5 points)

Do you have a Music scheme of work? (5 points)

Do you have a Music policy? (5 points)

If you have over 50 points, give your school the Bronze Award.
Silver Award

Do you have at least two concerts where ensembles (and some soloists) perform and monthly recitals where soloists play? (5 points)

Is each class performing a musical play or a concert? (5 points)

Does your choir perform in two parts and fully understand how to use their head and chest voices? (5 points)

Does your school have a variety of different instrumental ensembles? (5 points)

Is there a wide variety of different instruments being taught at your school? (5 points)

Has any of your ensembles played away from school on a trip somewhere locally or internationally? (5 points)

Does each class have opportunities to play recorders, violins, ukuleles, African drums, or keyboard together as a class or in small groups? (5 points)

Does your school collaborate with other schools or with your music hub? (5 points)

Do you have a good quality stock of untuned percussion instruments so each child can play an instrument together as a class? (5 points)

Do you have a set of bells and a bell ensemble? (5 points)

Do you have an inventory of every instrument and resource in the department? (5 points)

Do you record children playing to assess the quality of their work? (5 points)

Do you teach the children to read musical notation as they sing and play? (5 points)

Do you teach the children how to use music technology? (5 points)

If you have over 60 points, give your school the Silver Award.

Gold Award

Do you have a concert and recital program where every one or two weeks there are musical ensembles and soloists including outside performers and community groups? (5 points)

Are there musical theatre performance opportunities for every child in your school and does your school recruit members for local amateur dramatic and musical theatre companies? (5 points)

Do you have an auditioned chamber choir as well as a mass non-auditioned choir? Can they perform from standard notation, without notation, accompanied and unaccompanied? Have you attended any competitions with your choir? (5 points)

Do you have a range of different ensembles with differing standards? For example, a beginners string ensemble, a training string ensemble and an advanced string ensemble? (5 points)

Do your students take and pass graded instrumental and singing examinations with excellent results? Are you a registered exam centre of have continuous dealings with another locally? (5 points)

Have you made recordings with your ensembles? Do they attend musical competitions? Do any of your players play with local, national or international ensembles? (5 points)

Do you have a culture where music making is normal and wide-spread in your school? Does every child play? (5 points)

Is your school a leader for other schools in your local area? Have you put on a music conference at your school? (5 points)

Do you lend out instruments to children so they can practice at home? (5 points)

Do you have an Orff ensemble of bass, alto and soprano xylophones and metalophones? (5 points)

Are your music teachers having excellent quality training and training other teachers themselves? (5 points)

Do you have recordings of every child and how they have improved over time in your school? (5 points)

Do your children perform to the highest of standards for their age and ability?

Can all children read music fluently? (5 points)

Can your children compose music using a notation package? Can they use a sequencer? (5 points)

Does your school have an excellent reputation for music? (5 points)

If you have over 70 points, give your school the Gold Award.

If I had to start a Primary Music department up from scratch with a very generous budget this is what I would get:

Piano, drums and guitars

1. Electric Piano – essential for teaching
2. Drum Kit – get a normal size kit, not a kiddy one
3. Bass guitar – and a bass amp.  Not any amp, it must be a bass amp.
4. Electric guitar – and an amp.
5. Acoustic guitar – a nice one for teaching purposes, very useful if you have to teach in a normal classroom

Tuned percussion

1. Bass xylophone – crazy expensive but if you are going to do Orff work you need it
2. Two alto xylophones
3. Four soprano xylophones
4. One alto metalophone
5. One soprano metalophone
6. Four glockenspiels
7. Four sets of diatonic rainbow handbells – for your Year 1 and 2 handbell club
8. 1 set of diatonic boomwhackers – cheap and useful for ostinato work
9. Selection of different types of tuned percussion beaters – get more than you think, don’t buy the cheap yellow plastic ones and find a nice big container to put them all in

Untuned percussion

1. 30 sleigh bells – not the wrist ones, they are fiddly.  You need these for early years Christmas
2. 6 half moon tambourines – essential, used all the time
3. 6 two toned woodblocks – not just used for Little Donkey
4. 6 triangles – with beaters, different sizes is fine
5. 3 cymbals (good quality big ones) – the small ones just don’t make the right sound
6. 15 pairs of plastic maracas (not the tiny ones) – wooden ones look nice but get damaged easily
7. 30 egg shakers – these are cheap and simple for basic rhythm work and can be easily stored
8. Chime tree – also known as a Mark tree – this gives a magical sound and is always used for shows.  Looks impressive too
9. Agogo bell – you only need one, they are that loud
10. 6 clickits – an unusual choice but these work very well in groups and are a good alternative to guiros.  I hate guiros
11. 30 pairs of claves – just get cheap ones for simple rhythm work
12. 6 wooden castanets – go for the animal ones, the normal ones are a nightmare for children to play well
13. 6 pairs of sand blocks – for scraping sounds
14. Vibraslap – you need this for sound effects
15. Thunderer – for sound effects
16. Rainstick – for sound effects

Drums

1. 6 lollipop drums – these are brilliant and have their own lollipop beaters
2. Bass drum – expensive but worth it for marching around to the beat.  You will need one with a stand
3. Congas – again a bit expensive but if you have two drummers one can do kit while the other does congas.  Congas are not bongos, they are tall and you stand up to play them
4. Djembe – just get one to start with but invest in these for the future when you want an African drumming group
5. Samba kit – not essential but like djembes something to invest in for the future.  Only get this if you want to start a samba band club.  You will need a member of staff who really knows what they are doing here, it is quite specialized.

Other essentials

1. 20 Music stands – for your orchestra.  Yes you will have one in time but this takes a while to build up.  Buy the stands now.
2. Storage for your instruments – go for something accessible for the children so they learn to pack away themselves.  I organize the instruments into tuned percussion storage, untuned percussion storage and a bell table
3. Subscription to SingUp – worth it as all colleagues can then do singing in class
4. Guitar stands.  I like to hang the instruments on the wall rather than having an additional instrument on the floor annoying the cleaner who has come to vacuum the floor

Books

1. “Singing Sherlock” books 1 and 2 – this is basically all you need for beginner Choir
2. “Flying a round” – for singing rounds
3. “Okkitokkiunga” – for KS 1 singing
4. Your show books – you have to do a show!
5. Music Express 1-6 – I don’t actually recommend these but you need some sort of scheme if you don’t have a music specialist and this would do to start with

Other instruments that parents pay for

1. Recorders – From Year 2 or 3, children should learn the recorder.  Parents should buy these as they should not be shared.  Just buy one for each child and then charge the parents £3.  Don’t let them buy their own from a shop, you need them all the same as they can actually be tuned differently.  And some parents get them from the Early Learning Centre – these aren’t proper instruments, they are just toys and make a dreadful sound.  Buy a dozen more recorders than you need as spares for new children who join the school and those who lose them and need to buy another
2. Recorder books – get copies of “Recorder From The Beginning” by John Pitts.  Children need to be encouraged to practice at home so they should have a recorder book.  Photocopying bits of paper is a logistical nightmare and always a false economy.  The book is really cheap.  Buy 15 copies for school use and send a letter home saying if parents pay you can get them a copy for children to practice at home.
3. Violins – its worth getting a class set of violins and then having a First Access group.  You can hire these from your local music hub (if you have one) but many schools like to have their own.  You will need replacement strings, resin and someone who can teach violin.
4. Ukuleles – from Year 5 do ukes.  Just like recorders, encourage parents to buy their own.  Cheap ones are fine but have some replacement strings.  If you want to buy the instruments yourself think carefully about storage.
5. Other orchestral instruments – again try to hire these and if you do buy some remember that if you buy the chepest then you will have a lot more costs in repair fees.  Repairing clarinets and trumpets is quite specialized and most general music teachers will not have this expertise as they get their own instruments fixed professionally

This is by no means an exhaustive list and it would be a very generous budget.  I have chosen these as apart from the electric piano, you can get them all in the MES (Music Education Supplies) order book.  This would give a great start to a Primary Music Department and as long as you have a great teacher or good music team, you should have enough to go along with for quite a few years.

I have been very lucky recently to watch an experienced colleague take a string orchestra rehearsal on a weekly basis.  She gets very high standards out of the students and obtains this in a patient, reflective manner, yet with scope for innovation.  What marks her out from most other people I have watched take rehearsals, is that she does not have her head in the score and is not actually that interested in conducting.  What she is after is the right sound, the right balance and giving ample time for perfecting short passages of music. 

Firstly, she knows exactly what each part is playing.  Many orchestral scores for school-age students are too complex and too dense.  When you arrange music you really only need three or four lines of music; the melody, the bass and the harmony.  The harmony is either one or two lines.  Because she knows exactly what everyone is playing, she is very good at communicating, not just the notes but the manner in which they are to be played.  She is not a native English speaker but is actually one of the best at communicating how music should be played.  There is the attention to detail – if bows are not moving in the same direction she will model exactly how they should be moving.  She will rehearse a section of music extensively with particular attention to articulation and tempo.  She will then go back a section and rehearse from a little further back.  In this way she builds the piece and gives people a “running jump” at the part where the focus has been directed at.  

Many people with an acute attention to detail are obsessed with the musical score and can rigidly only play what is written, but my colleague is actually very good at giving space for innovation.  She will rehearse one section and ask the cello player to play it two different ways before deciding what she wants.  She has experimented with electric instruments and drums and is unafraid to try and play something familiar a little differently.  This unpredictability keeps things fresh; we may be rehearsing only a small amount of pieces but no rehearsal is the same and there is always a focus and a clear objective.  

And finally there is the limitless expectation of crazy high standards.  Sometime teachers are afraid of high standards, thinking it is oppressive and too pushy.  But most people want to be part of something good.  Very few people are happy playing in something they know is a bit rubbish – we all want to feel we are part of something successful.  The students know this and success breeds success.  Being part of the string orchestra is an honor – and to stay in it means dedication, hard work and practice, practice, practice.  She will not hesitate to chuck you out if she thinks you are not putting the work in and the students are very aware of this.  So why do they want to put in the work, time and effort?

Because when you hear what they can play, you understand why it is worth every second spent in rehearsal.  The results are simply stunning.

Music teaching has been very strong when it comes to assessment.  The instrumental graded examinations are well established and well respected.  In fact, in David Blunkett’s period in office as Education secretary, he said that we should move general school assessment away from year group cohorts to a system of when you are ready, whatever age you are you pass a graded test.  But as we know full well, this is still a dream close to twenty years later.  Instrumental exams are very good at giving quality assessment for children regardless of age.  We can quibble about the cost, the preparation, the performance anxiety and stressful external examiners watching over anxious children trying to play music despite nerves and expectations, but in the end, children get good written feedback and a certificate worth something to them.  It even counts for UCAS points.  And in my case, it has got me jobs that I wouldn’t have been able to get without them!

But assessment in classes is a totally different kettle of fish.  This is where assessment in Music goes wrong.  Sometimes we have group assessment.  In my opinion this is close to worthless.  I have heard countless students recollect their experiences of group work in Music lessons where one person does all the work, or you end up with a rubbish grade because some lazy bugger messed it all up for all of you.  There are things we can learn from group assessment but it is not a good way to assess children individually as the actual grade given is often more to do with behaviour and attitude than ability.  We can do paired assessment but again, in Music the nature of sound means that it can be very difficult to assess who is doing what, especially if they play or sing in unison.  So we go back to individual assessment and we end up with the difficulty of hearing thirty students play individually in a class assessment lesson.  These lessons are normally my most unsuccessful because quite frankly the children get bored listening to each other play and as a result switch off, fiddle, gaze out the window or get up to some mischievous behavior when I am distracted trying to listen intently to a pupils performance.

Interestingly, the most successful lessons are the lessons after the assessments where the children are desperate to do it again but do it right.  It’s not just a case of trying to change their grade, they want to improve from the feedback they have been given.  The problem is we assess near the end of a module; what we need to be doing is assessing the first or second week in and then continuously refining our performances.  But that way we also run into boredom as who wants to keep on playing the same thing over and over again, week in and week out?  There are no easy answers.

And the main correlation I have found with assessment is the more you assess, the less you can teach.  There is certainly some truth to the expression “you can keep weighing the pig but it won’t get any fatter if you don’t feed it”.  We do not have the time in our weekly hour or so lessons for 36 weeks a year to mess around with colour-coded, meaningless grades that are demanded from hungry school management IT systems.  So my penny’s worth is basically, if we are going to assess we need to do it early and then reassess.  It needs to be low stakes and needs to be meaningful.  Sadly, in most schools around the world, class Music assessment is the complete opposite.  

In our school we are trailing a new recorder scheme called Recorder Karate.  The idea is that as you progress on the instrument you pass a selection of belts from white to black.  It has been very successful but there are some interesting side effects to the scheme.

To start with, the system of belts has worked like a dream, with children desperate to pass their assessment belts.  These are not abstract belts, they look like this:

They are multicolored hair bobbles that you can buy very cheap.

The children in Year 3 love to collect them and applaud one another when they pass each assessment. Because of this, it is the best scheme I have used as far as assessment and differentiation is concerned.  But if you spend a lot of time on assessment there are consequences and the main ones are less teaching time and loss of motivation when children listen to each other play.  If you have a class of thirty and hear everyone play, even if you give each child only one minute of time that comes to thirty minutes of the other children sitting around.  We could get them to self assess each other but quite frankly that often ends up in bullying afterwards in the playground.  The children are not old enough to fully understand what it means to objectively peer assess without becoming personal.  The other alternative is you listen to the children play in a breaktime but music teachers often have choirs and other groups at breaktime and just like any other teacher we should have some time off teaching and assessing for our own sanity!  Nonetheless, the scheme has worked well and for the first time I can hand on heart say that I know exactly the ability and progress of every child in the class, what their strengths are and what they need to do to get better.
Other things we need to get right are the difficulty of the belts; just because you add additional notes does not make the piece harder and the lower register is much harder than the higher register.  And we had a very pationate conversation about notation in our team.  In fact I am going to suggest a new law in Music Teaching where every conversation about music given enough time will end up with an argument about notation!  Basically some people think that the harder belts ought to only be achieved by children who can read the notation without the letters put above the notes.  I can see some value in this but I also think that we are creating barriers to playing at quite an early age.  Are we assessing a musical skill or a reading skill?  Some musicians would say the two are linked but I am not so sure.  

I will later post the actual pieces we are using for the scheme but first I want to finish it before publishing the content.  I still think that the recorder is highly undervalued and should be a compulsory part of every primary school and Recorder Karate is certainly a good way of achieving that aim.  

A traditionalist approach to education involves drills.  In Music Education these are simply a two to five minute whole class activity to practice rhythms, singing, performing, aural or written notation skills.  They are almost always teacher-led, although if they are known well enough, a child can lead the drill.  Every lesson should have some drills and they should get harder as the children get older.  The reason we do drills is because in most schools we only get a 50 minute Music lesson and it is the only time we get to practice the basic skills.  If we do not drill what often happens is that children forget the basics.  We then get into the situation that because we have taught the material we assume it is learned when it is not.  If learning is when children can recall knowledge and skills from long term memory and apply them, we need to do drill. 

In my lessons we spend up to twenty minutes doing drills.  The kids love them.  Here are some examples:

1) Rhythm Drill

I start this in Year 2.  We learn the basic rhythms as creepy crawlies.  So a semibreve is “snake”, a minim is “worm”, a crotchet is “fly”, quavers are “spider”, semiquavers are “caterpillar”.  We also have grasshopper, ladybug and rests.  I teach the rhythms with a new minibeast every two weeks.  We then perform about twelve different two-bar written rhythms which the children clap back in unison.  I do this every lesson for about sixteen weeks.  Then we write the rhythms on mini-whiteboards.  I say and clap the rhythm and the children “dictate” them by writing them in standard rhythmic notation.  They show me their slates and we praise and correct right and wrong answers.  We do this for about four weeks and then I will clap the rhythms but not say the minibeast names and they have to write them down by remembering the names from long term memory.  It is then good to leave this drill for a while before reintroducing it later on so the children have had time to forget and then relearn.  Interleaving practice is very powerful and results in stronger memories of the material when you learn it a second time.  The drills need to be revisited so that the content can be engrained in long term memory.  This will help our secondary colleagues who can then teach much more complex skills than basic rhythm for Year 7’s.  Sadly I have seen Year 9’s doing only simple crotchet and quaver rhythms because they simply do not know their names, durations or notations.  As students get older I teach them more complicated rhythms and the proper names for the notes.  I even teach the American and the British terms so they know that when a person talks about a quarter note or a crotchet they are referring to the same thing.  The rhythm drills take about three minutes to complete, about 100 minutes a school year.

2) Pitch Drill

We use the Kodaly system to start with in Year 1.  Unlike many Kodaly experts, I teach the notes in ascending order rather than sticking with “so me la” tunes.  I will do singing games using the natural “so me la” intervals but not for drill.  I put the notes and their Kodaly hand signs on the board and sing simple melodies using the notes.  The children repeat them.  This is again teacher directed but after many weeks I have allowed a child who has good pitching to “be the teacher”.  The drill remains the same. Like in the rhythm drill I will get the children to write down a series of pitches on white boards using the letters “d r m f s l t d”.  In Year 2 we continue Kodaly pitch but then I move on to using numbers 1 to  8 when we use handbells and C to C when we learn glockenspiels and xylophones.  I explain that they are the same things, just written in different ways.  Again, this drill will be repeated every lesson before stopping for a month or so and then reintroducing the drill.  I try not to combine Rhythm and Pitch drills until the children are older.

3) Performance Drill

When we learn any instrument we do performance drills.  I will play or sing a series of pitches or a rhythm and the children will repeat them.  It is a good warm up and revisits the basics.  I have also written performance drills using standard Western notation and graphic notation so the children can read and play simultaneously.  I will only make these one or two bars long and repeat them four times.  The first time the more aware kids get it right, the second time most the class gets it right, the third time the dreamers get it right and the fourth time even the weakest normally get it right.  It is useful to put on a steady beat on a keyboard or use a backing track so you can check the students are playing correctly.

4) Aural Drill

I play five notes on the piano ascending and then change the pitch of one of them the second time.  The children have to put up 1-5 fingers to say which one is different.  I will play three notes in no particular order for them to discriminate.  I sometimes make it longer and play up to ten notes for a challenge.  But there will always be aural drills because that is the key to good listening and aural awareness.

5) Instrument Drill

At the end of every lesson I play four sounds and the children have to identify the instrument.  If you keep this up every week and only change one or two or put them in different orders, by the end of Year 6 most children should be able to identify about fifty instruments from their sounds.  For older year groups I will combine two or even three sounds to discriminate between.

There are many, many other drills.  But the important thing is to be consistent and revisit continuously.  Any decent musician or sportsman will tell you that practice and discipline are paramount to excellence. That’s why we do drill.  It may seem obvious but I would not be writing about this if drill was happening in most primary schools.  It isn’t and that’s why we need to unashamedly promote it.  This is why I am not happy with the “Music Express” books in most primary schools.  There are some great activities but there is no drill.  That is why children can get to Year 6 and not know the difference between a violin and a cello, an A or a B or a crotchet and a minim.  Some teachers are scared of repeating activities in case the children get bored.  If this is what you think I would recommend you watch Children’s TV.  It’s all repetition with slight variants.  Kids learn through repetition; the key is to just slightly tweak it every lesson so they progress.  

Let’s reclaim the word “drill” as a positive, fun and engaging learning experience!

 

I have now been teaching guitar to Year 5 for the past half term and I can give a bit of feedback as to how it is going and how it compares to the ukulele.

The negatives to start with.  First of all, the guitars have been a nightmare to store as we haven’t quite got the storage right in our school.  The carpenters will be building us a guitar storage rack over half term so this problem should be sorted relatively soon.  Secondly, the guitars have been a nightmare to tune as there are six strings and there are 28 students in each class.  I have started to only tune the first three as we have only been using them to play simple chords.  Thirdly, the majority of the children tried and failed to play the simple D chord as they found it way to difficult to put a three fingered chord shape on the guitar.  I tried to simplify the process to get D into three stages but that didn’t work either.  Perhaps if we plug at it every week we might make some progress.  I remember it took me about three weeks to perfect the D chord. Fourthly, there have been some difficulties with physical space as children are too close to one another and cannot hear themselves play.  There is not much we can do about that – the room is too small.

The positives.  Firstly, 95% of the children can play “Yellow Submarine” using simple chords C, G and G7 and sing at the same time.  There has been a definite improvement in attitude and attainment since we had “Yellow Submarine” as the assessment task – they seem to be taking it more seriously and the few students that were treating the guitar as a toy are now treating it as an instrument. Secondly, differentiation is easy in guitar lessons – the extension activity is to play full chords rather than the simple versions.

I still think ukulele would be better for Year 5 than guitar.  It would be easier to store and tune and it would be easier for children to take home and practice.  The chords are about the same difficulty but you get the satisfaction of playing all the strings rather than just three.  It would also take up less space so guitars won’t be bashing into one another and each child should be able to hear themselves play more clearly.  And they are easier for small hands to hold.

It’s a closer result than I thought it would be.  I would say it’s 2-1 to Uke United.

 

I wrote a song a few years ago to fit in with my Christmas musical “Polo’s Christmas”.  It is about the Northern Lights and is suitable for Key Stages 1 and 2.  There is nothing religious about the song and it can be used at any time.  I’ve enclosed the vocal track (thanks to Megan who sang this when she was 13), the backing track and the printed sheet music.

the-northern-lights-full-score

I have created an original piece for our Developmental Orchestra.  It is designed so all our musicians can have a part that they can play.  The First Access students who are learning clarinet, violin, cello and trumpet all have a very simple piece using only a few notes so they can join the Orchestra.  The other parts are designed for those working around Grade 1-2.  The Audio is taken straight from the computer notation package Sibelius where I composed the music.

The scores can all be found in this pdf file:

slithering-snakes-orchestral-version-parts

If you would like to try this piece out you are very welcome.  There are another 9 pieces to follow in the coming months.

This is a continuation of my series of useful books for Primary schools.

Three Singing Pigs is a great book of stories by Kaye Umansky that are designed to be performed with instruments and singing.  They are aimed at Key Stage 1 pupils but some can be used in Key Stage 2.  I have used some of the stories as a one off lesson and used some as a performance piece for a whole term.

The best stories for music in my opinion are “The Awongalema Tree”, “Tiddalik”, “The Hairy Scary Castle”, “Treasure Island” and “Jack and the Beanstalk”. I have done all of these successfully with both Y1 and Y2.

This is a great book for those departments that sadly have few instruments but a random collection of odds and ends that make sound.  But it is also great if you have a wide selection of instruments – these stories work with whatever you have.

There is enough material for at least half the year and anyone teaching Key Stage 1 music ought to have them by their desk.  There are some others in the series “Three Tapping Teddies”, “Three Singing Pigs”, “Three Rapping Rats” and “Three Rocking Crocs” but this is probably the best of them.

I have been re-reading Dan Willingham’s book “Why students don’t like school” and thinking about distractions and general thinking in the Music classroom.  If learning is about transferring knowledge and skills from working memory into long term memory and memory is the residue of thought, then we should be concerned about what can distract us from thinking in Music lessons. And the answer is, an awful lot.  

My main worry is group composition in lessons.  Sadly, there are so many possible distractions that group composition can be incredibly unfocused.  And in many lessons the composition part can take up the majority of the time.  I have seen students (in my own classroom sadly and in others) spend time thinking about their hair, someone else’s hair, what’s happening tonight, what happened last night, why it is unfair that Sonia has the bass drum, why it is unfair that Sonia cannot work with me, why it’s unfair that Sonia has Heidi in her group and she can play the piano so they have an unfair advantage.  You get the idea.  You could say that this is simply poor group work but I can assure you that if you have more than three groups composing together in a room or in separate rooms, there will be students thinking of many, many other things that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter when you are not looking.  It’s human nature and you probably did the same as a kid if you were put in a similar situation.  You can probably still get composition work done but there is an opportunity cost – the time you have spent cannot be given back, and we already have little time in Music lessons as in most schools we only see the children once a week for 45 minutes to an hour.

Paired work is often a lot better as you can bounce ideas off one another and not into the group void.  Individual work is probably the best for thinking but for some students that struggle, it can be useful to have some input from another person.  Subsequently, I try to cut down the amount of composing in lessons unless it is done by individuals and pairs.  Sadly, so much of the current Music curriculum is geared to compositional group work and it is still seen as best practice even though many students are simply not thinking about music in music lessons.

Willingham says that the most important principle for teachers to think about is what the children will be thinking about in whatever activity you are doing.  And if there is not much thought going on then it will not be remembered and therefore will not be learned.  Good learning requires deep thinking with ample time for practice.  An example of how to make a task which has substandard thinking turned into one with deeper thinking is with copying rhythms.  Music teachers often start lessons with copying rhythms and these can be fun and motivating but actually there is very little thinking going on.  The teacher claps, the children copy.  A better activity in my opinion is the “forbidden rhythm” where if a certain pattern is played by the leader then the children have to put up their hands rather than copy the rhythm. This is better because the children need to be thinking to themselves what the forbidden rhythm is and constantly compare it with the current rhythm being played.  If it is not the forbidden rhythm then you can copy it, but if it is then you have to put your hand up.  So it’s actually a form of comparison and not simply copying, which requires a lot more thought.  

The other major distractions in Music lessons are the set up of the rooms themselves.  Even if you are the most amazing teacher in the universe, if your room is an Aladdin’s cave of musical treasure then you are competing with visual and audio gluttony.  The kids see the instruments and want to play them.  Perfectly natural.  But are they focused on the lesson?  Probably not, through no fault of anyone really.  This is why I think we need to spend a lot more time thinking about the set up of our rooms and the storage of instruments.  Currently in my classroom we have some guitars around the room and as soon as one falls over it is domino rally.  And any learning goes out the window when you see twenty eight guitars cascading around the four corners of the room.  We desperately need a storage solution, either racks or guitar stands.  Not just because of the guitars going constantly out of tune but because the distractions are not good for learning.  

And that’s kinda the point of school. 

The British government has produced a Green Paper detailing new ideas for education.  There are proposals such as universities only being able to charge more fees if they set up schools, new obligations for independent schools in order to keep their charitable status, but the big news is the return of selection in the form of allowing grammar schools to open or expand and encouraging them to do so with 50 million pounds of public money.

I have always been of the opinion that a good school is a good school and I am uninterested in the structures and systems. There are good and bad things about all schools but in the end it does seem to be the teaching and leadership that count the most.  However, I am uncomfortable with selection, as this is the best way to make some schools succeed and some schools fail.  Your intake is the best measure of how successful your school will be.  This would probably place me as an opponent of grammar schools but actually I am not, simply because I am more against the hypocrisy of the whole debate on selection.

Selection is rampant in children’s lives.  It always has been.  It might even have something to do with evolution as we naturally rank other human beings in so many facets of life.  We select in sports teams, swimming galas, maths Olympiads, debate teams, eisteddfods, head boy/head girl, chamber choirs, beauty in beauty pageants, plays, ballet, sometimes even the school council.  Schools select streams of ability and set.  Even the ones that say they don’t still select by questioning, gender, race and even age.  We want to say our school systems are fair but they are not.  In reality adults select children and children select children and these decisions can have profound effects on our lives.

The BRIT school of performing arts in Croydon selects by attitude.  This is close to selection by mindset.  What is the difference between selecting via an examination where only your paper is seen and an interview where you are on show?  Which is the fairest?  And if we didn’t select for the Brit would we have got Adele and Amy Winehouse and the host of other successful alumni from the school?  People may argue that selection on musical ability is different to selection on academic ability.  My question is why?  Why is one OK and the other not?  The main argument is that we want to allow our most gifted musicians the best possible facilities and opportunities and the Brit certainly does this.  If you go to the West End theatres and look in the programmes you will certainly see performers who originated from the Brit and the Sylvia Young schools.  But surely that is the same argument for grammar schools, to allow our most academically gifted students the best possible path to academic excellence as it is not only advantageous for them but also to us as a nation.  

The next point that people may say is that eleven is too young for academic selection.  But we allow auditions way below eleven for many television shows.  Why is it OK to select by acting ability at eight but not OK to select by academic ability at eleven?  If you are going to select by ability when is the opportune time?  Is eleven just a problem because of the historical compulsion element of selection from the 1944 Butler Act?  In some ways it makes perfect sense because almost all children change schools at the age of eleven, so that would be the most sensible time to select.

I still think a fully comprehensive system is the ideal but let’s not kid ourselves.  We have a lot of selection in and out of school and the most important thing we can tell children is that the systems are not fair, adults make mistakes and not to base any of our opinions of ourselves or others on what happened to us for the short time we were in school.

I am now teaching guitar to Year 5.  I am a little hesitant as the guitars we have are quite big and the Year 5’s are quite small.  I would prefer to be doing ukulele which is a much more appropriate instrument for Year 5 but we have 30 guitars and no ukuleles, so guitars it is.

I have put the guitars around the edges of the room and this is working out well as I tried it out today and 28 children successfully got their guitar and put it back in the correct places without any trouble.  I have seated the children in four rows of seven according to their house (we use a house system in school) with any left-handers on the very left of the room as the teacher faces it so their arms don’t whack each other if they are sitting next to a right-hander.  The front row collect guitars from the front of the room, the back collect them from the back and the two rows in the middle collect their guitars from the sides.  The left-handed guitars are kept at the front and are labeled with an L so we know that these strings have been reversed.

Before we started playing we did aural, singing, rhythms and some theoretical work including knowing which part of the guitar was which, so we have some technical vocabulary in common use.  We then got the guitars and did some strumming to the beat.  Nothing difficult – just holding the guitars correctly and strumming in four in a bar.  We then had a go at picking a tune and we tried “Hot Cross Buns”.  This was quite difficult for some of the children as it required using the fourth finger and for beginners this can be troublesome.  The reason is that we barely use the little finger in everyday life and it needs strengthening over quite a long period of time.  Music teachers often forget this and wonder why children find it so hard but if you think back to when you were learning, I am sure you had the same difficulties.  And if you didn’t you need to know you are in a very select minority!  “Hot Cross Buns” is a good song to keep playing over many weeks as by repeating the exercise you will strengthen the little finger.  And you are not going to strengthen it by not using it!  However, in retrospect, as it was the first lesson it might have been best to start with a tune using two notes.

We haven’t learned any chords yet but I will probably move onto an easy four string chord of G where you only need to put your third finger on the third fret of the little E string.  This will probably be enough content for two or three weeks and then we will move onto D which is much more complicated for youngish children.

Guitars can definitely be done in Year 5 but if you are starting an instrumental program from scratch I would advise you to use ukuleles first.  If I was to put an age on it, I would do ukes in Year 4 and guitars in Year 6 or Year 7.  But there are no hard and fast rules, and I am looking forward to seeing what the children can manage in the future.  

This is the week when all around the world teachers are putting up displays.  I have currently been putting up backing paper and that crinkly border thing and getting annoyed with finding the stapler, running out of staples, the resource room being locked, running out of green backing paper, putting up paper that looked just right and then realised it didn’t fit by an inch and then getting frustrated as the whole thing is wonky and creased.

I hate displays.

Well that’s not quite true.  I like them when other people do them for me.  Like this one:

Our resident artist put this one up in my last school during the summer holiday.  It was great.  No cork boards, staples hanging out, no backing paper, no crinkly border thingy.  And when the kids came in they went wow.  It was the power of my laziness that brought in something amazing that I could not possibly do to my classroom myself.  

However, my wonderful back wall does not have a huge amount of learning in it.  There are no word walls or musical terms or anything vaguely educational (btw – they were on the other wall).  But I am doubtful of the value of display in general from both a research and a personal perspective.  Firstly, there is evidence to suggest that classroom display can be detrimental to learning http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24855019.  A calm, uncluttered room with white walls and nice paintings might foster a calm attitude to learning and engage students to interact with the teacher and each other rather than look around the room in an unfocused manner.  I also remember my music room at school had a poster of composers from 1600.  I used to spend hours looking at this poster and was always getting into trouble for not paying attention to my teacher.  I now know an awful lot about classic composers – well more about how long they lived.  I remember being suitably impressed with Stravinsky and Bach who had really long lines and felt a bit sorry for Mozart and Schubert who only had a short one.  But I also remember having to cram in my GCSE course in two weeks because I had not been paying enough attention to the teacher in the lessons for the past two years.

There is much learning that can be delivered through the use of displays.  But we need to know exactly what we want children to learn from them and what their purpose is.  Probably the best displays will be ones which reinforce key words and concepts that will be perpetuated for the whole year or even years.  I don’t see why we should always take down an effective display just because we have to tear them down at the end of the year.  Why?  But this is often a school policy and I have seen it happen in many schools.  It seems more a policy to increase teacher workload than anything to do with learning.  I guess the argument is so we don’t get lazy and keep up falling down displays where the crinkly border thingy is hanging off one staple.  But most teachers wouldn’t do that if they actually care and if they don’t, why would you employ them?

There is a role for engagement and motivation and that can be delivered from the walls of the classroom but an alternative is to have a book of children’s work on a music stand that all children or parents can see – a record of the work they have done.  Most musical work is musical and perhaps the best display of children’s work that we can have is a pair of earphones connected to a MP3 player of children’s performances.  

Anyway.  Now we have the key to the store it’s back to the backing paper.  And if I can’t think of anything inspirational, I’d better contact Daydream Education quick and buy some of their excellent posters.  

I have accepted a position at a new international school working with slightly older children.  Before, this blog was mainly about Key Stage 1.  I am teaching Key Stage 2 now with a little Key Stage 1 with a much more instrumental emphasis.  The school does a variety of different Wider Opportunity programs and the Year 6 begin the Musical Futures scheme.  I will not be teaching Year 6 but I hope to observe how Musical Futures works by watching my colleagues teach.

In posts to come I will be looking at whole class recorders, whole class violins, whole class ukuleles, whole class trumpets, whole class clarinets, whole class djembe percussion, whole class keyboards and whole class guitars.  I am also hoping to bring in a two-part choir and possibly a chamber choir for Year 5.  I will also be working on recorder ensembles and string groups.

I also hope to review a selection of musicals for school children and look at what is appropriate now and how it has changed through time. I am also going to post on how to improve children’s aural work and how to bring in basic theory and notation for children in Key Stage 2.

Happy New School Year!

 

This is a continuation of my series of relatively old books that are useful in Primary Schools.

What is “Sing Together”?

This is basically a book of folk and traditional songs.  There are a hundred altogether and there is a small book that pupils can read from with the melody and the words as well as a teacher book with the piano music in.  There are no chords written in, so it is not ideal for guitar.  This book is suitable for Key Stage 2 and 3.

Why is it good?

1) It has many well known folk songs that should be passed down to future generations.

2) It is widely used as repertoire for the ABRSM singing examinations.

3) The music is written out simply and clearly.

4) It is excellent for teaching notation as you sing.  For example you can ask the children, what note is the highest you sing?  What note is the lowest?  What note is the word “sand”?  How many beats are on the last note?  Why is there a letter “p” by those words?  What dynamic marking does it mean?

5) Having the notes next to the words is considered good practice in KS 2.  The Music Hub report undertaken by OFSTED mentioned that many schools did not go far enough in teaching singing and bringing the notation in at the same time.

6) The music is written with the head voice in mind.  If you want to get children to use their head voice, these older books are good as the more modern ones are often written in keys that are too low.  Most sung music seems to have gone down a tone and half in the last 30 years which is why we have so many children trying to belt out songs rather than learn how to use their head voice.

7) The repertoire is varied from all over the world.

Why is it not widely used anymore?

1) The format is old-fashioned.

2) The songs choices are old.

3) Some might say that it would not enthuse modern children to sing.

4) Singing from a book can result in poor posture and poor technique.

5) Reliance on reading rather than singing may put some children off singing.

6) No chords for guitar.

7) There are arguably better, more modern publications out there.

Verdict

If you have these books in your department, use them.  There are some real gems and some songs that we really must pass down like “Cockles and Mussels” and “The Oak and the Ash”.  The notation aspect is very useful, rather than just teach notation discretely, sing the notation.  I always find it is best to use George Odam’s phrase “the sound before the symbol”. Sing the songs and then go into depth about their structure, singing them again with attention to all the musical elements.  But do not make this your only singing resource, I would recommend many of the books by Out of the Ark as well as the excellent Singup.

Music is often referred to as a skills-based subject and the actual musical content unimportant.  I would disagree with this approach strongly.  The idea that the skill influences the chosen repertoire is widely agreed upon by music educationalists.  However, what can happen is that songs and pieces that should be commonly known can end up not being taught.  For example, the first time I ever heard the song “My Favourite Things” from the Sound of Music was when I was twenty years old in University.  People were amazed I had never heard this song, in fact the first version I ever heard was the fantastic saxophone interpretation by John Coltrane.  Why did I not know it?  There was no music in my home – my grandparents who raised me only listened to Radio 4.  Any music I heard had to come from school or recommended from friends.  Was it important that I did not know this song?  Well it made me feel a bit stupid at the time and I did wish that I had come across it before.  No one likes to be on the fringe of a conversation because they don’t have the prior knowledge to engage with it.  It also explains why I had no idea what “blue satin sashes” were until my twenties, while my EAL children in Year 2 are fully aware of what satin is and what it looks like because of the reference from the song and the pictures I showed them as a result of learning the lyrics.  This is the argument that ED Hirsch gives for “Cultural Literacy” – things that you really should know so you can read a broadsheet newspaper, or have meaningful conversations where you are not having to blag your way through as you have no idea what the other people are talking about.  It really gets to the root of what it means to be an educated person.

So I would argue that we ought to have some common repertoire that students all over British schools can engage with.  I am making my own list but there is one that already exists here: at the Core Knowledge Curriculum for years 1-6.

 

I am currently writing a set of piano duets for children and adults who have had about half a year to a years worth of lessons.  They are influenced by some Diabelli duets I used to play as a teenager where you play some simple tunes using ten fingers.  There will be nine or ten duets in total, I have written four so far.  Here is “Forget-me-nots” if you fancy trying it out:

Forgetmenots Primo

Forgetmenots Secondo

Forgetmenots

 

Give a class of children a set of instruments with no instruction and I can guarantee you will have a set of broken instruments and a class of children clueless how to play them properly.  If you want children to play instruments correctly they need to know the following

1. What they are called
2. Where they are stored
3. How to hold them
4. How to play them
5. How we put them away

For this to happen you need to have consistency, which normally means the instruments should be stored in a music room or on a music trolley.  Sadly in many Early Years environments this does not seem to be happening as what I have observed is that instruments are placed randomly around for children to play and given almost no instruction.  I suggest that you use the following method to introduce young children to a variety of instruments and to teach them how to use them.  Only then should you allow children to have access to instruments in a free choice environment.  I have done this successfully with 3 year old children.  I would repeat the process over four weeks.

1. Seat all children in a big circle
2. Take an instrument and say the name of it twice.  Tell children to say the name three times
3. Say “I am going to give the _____ to _____”
4. Play the instrument correctly
5. Explain any misconceptions on how it is played.  For example say “Some people think you play the triangle like this.  That’s not right! This is how you play it!”
6. Put the instrument behind each child and say that no one can play their instrument until the teacher says the magic word “play”
7. Do this for every child until there is an instrument behind everyone
8. Say to the children “Take your instrument, now play”
9. Let them play for about 15 to 20 seconds.  Use the time to correct technique, especially on the cymbals and the triangle
10. Say “Stop. Instruments on the floor.  Hands on heads.  Stand up.  Move to the next instrument”
11. Make sure the children move clockwise to the next instrument
12. Repeat process until children have played every instrument
13. On the last round, tell the children to put their instrument into the middle and sit back down in their place where they were
14. Then go around the circle and say “____ can you please put the _____away”
15. Help the child find the instrument if they need help locating it.  Repeat the name of the instrument continuously and point to where it goes.  Do not put the instrument away for the child.  This their job.
16. Continue for every child.  Do an inspection at the end so the children understand that putting instruments away tidily is an expectation
17. When all the instruments are away, line the children up for the exit
18. Say “Tell me the name of your favourite instrument”.  Do not accept one word answers, ask them to say “my favourite instrument is the _____”
19. If they do not know the name of an instrument, let them watch four or five children say it so they know what they have to say
20. Wait till all have exited
21. Have a nervous breakdown, a glass of whiskey and recuperation time to recover from the ear onslaught

This is a very noisy activity but there is a lot of learning as long as you repeat the activity for a few weeks so they remember the names of the instruments and how they are played.  I then think it is a good idea to wait a few weeks and then go back to the activity as interleaving practice will reinforce the learning.  Only then should you allow children to have free choice of instruments and you still have to reiterate how they should be played.  If you do this then your maracas will not be in pieces on the floor and your bongos will not have holes in them. More importantly, the children will know the names of the instruments, how they should be played and where they are stored which will make instrumental activities much easier and calmer in the future.

A good way to get children to perform music from notation is through the use of graphic scores.  Here is one I have prepared for Year 2:

And another example:

I normally model the activity with four children and get them to play through their part while the whole class chants from 1-8.  After we have performed each part individually, we put them all together.  It seldom works first time so I spend quite a while getting it exactly correct before putting the children into groups of four.  If the class is not divisible by four, an extra child plays one of the parts, normally the triangle part on a cymbal.  I set the groups beforehand and tell the children which instrument they are playing so we don’t get any arguments.  I get all the children to play together as I count to eight and then hear them group by group to check all the children are on task.  It requires concentration and knowing exactly when to play – some of the most important skills in music performance.

The pieces get a little harder each time.  In the next one we have some instruments playing twice to a beat:

And later on we have four to a beat:

This task can then be made into a composition where each child individually makes their own graphic score using the same symbols on a grid like this:

It’s best to keep the composition with only one note to a beat to start with but as the children get used to it, there is no reason why they can’t do two or four notes to a beat.  I use the words “spider” and “caterpillar” so the children can fit the notes in correctly.

I normally do not start any composition task until the children are very comfortable with the notation system and have played through quite a few pieces first.  I ask them to put their name on their composition, attach them on a clipboard and then play the piece on a music stand in their small group.  I think it is important to play with a music stand as it gets the children to stand correctly and have everyone looking in the same direction.

I have made some simpler graphic scores for Early Years.  The only difference is that these pieces start with only four beats and then get progressively harder to six beats:

Starting with just the four beats is preferably for a few weeks then just add an extra beat to make it a little harder and check they are reading horizontally.  You can make this into a composition task if you want to.

Towards the end of this half term I will also be adding some dynamics into the graphic scores so the Year 2 children learn the Italian terms pianissimo, piano, mezzo piano, mezzo forte, forte and fortissimo as well as crescendo and diminuendo.

I haven’t made any graphic scores for Year 1, because in this term they are making musical stories.  I will blog on those another time. To perform my graphic scores you will need a set of tambourines, woodblocks, lollipop drums and triangles.  For a class of 32 children that will be eight instruments each.  You will also need music stands.  Here are the pdf’s for both Early Years and Year 2.

EY2 Graphic Scores

Year 2 Graphic Scores