A few friends of mine have spoken about the poor quality of music provision in primary schools.  One said there was no music for five years apart from an annual nativity and music was simply not taught in lessons. I understand that many schools do not have much money and cannot afford a specialist music teacher. The following post is what I think should be the minimum provision that a school should deliver for any child in any primary school. Whether delivered by a specialist or nonspecialist, everything here is achievable by any teacher with a very small budget and a small amount of musical knowledge and expertise.

1. All children must sing. This is not hard to achieve. A song takes about three minutes to sing. There are approximately six hours in a school day. Every child should sing every day.
2. All children must play. There are simple instruments that all children can learn. Recorders, ocarinas, glockenspiels, drums. Many schools I have worked in have a recorder as part of the school uniform. If parents really can’t afford it (they cost about four pounds each) this should be the priority for any music budget.
3. All schools must have musical ensembles. This means you need to start a recorder group and a choir at the very least. You should provide information on other groups available in your local community. If you have not done so already, find out where your local music hub is and what they offer. As far as a recorder group and choir go, these need to be twenty minutes long or longer. The music coordinator does not need to run these groups themselves, but an extra hour a week is not excessive if your job is to coordinate music in a school.
4. There must be instrumental provision. You should be offering a selection of piano or keyboard, violins and cellos, flutes, clarinets and saxophones, drum kit, guitar, ukulele, trumpets and trombones as well as singing. If you do not know of any teachers who offer these instruments, you should be advertising or phone up local musicians from the Yellow Pages. If you can cover some of the cost that’s great, if you can’t at least make sure parents know where they can get this provision. Let instrumental teachers advertise in your school free of charge and encourage them to come in to advertise their instrument(s) in school assemblies or try-out evenings. Do not try to force a certain time for them to teach, they travel around and can only teach where they have a slot available. They are normally very accommodating.
5. All children must be musically literate. This is the most controversial of my requirements as many music teachers simply do not agree with this. However, it is unfair that secondary music teachers have to teach children basic notation from scratch because it is not covered in primary schools. Additionally, it is a requirement of the new National Curriculum for Music for Key Stage 2. It is mandatory – you must teach standard staff notation. Teach it using instruments rather than straight written theory. If you don’t have any instruments then clap rhythms and use the Kodaly system (do, re, mi) to teach pitch while you fundraise for classroom instruments.
6. There must be concerts. There should be an annual music concert.  In the concerts you should feature the choir, instrument ensembles, soloists and as many other ensembles as you have.  Put a sign up sheet in your schools reception to get performers.  Obtain some parent involvement if possible, this might get more people to come to your concert.  Seeing one of the parents dress up as Elvis and perform “Hound Dog” was a very special occasion in one of my schools!  I know it’s an event for the children but they love it when they see other people perform.  You may need to buy or borrow music stands for the instrumentalists who perform at your concert.  If they need to be accompanied you will need to hire a pianist for the event or use backing tracks. You may need to talk to the parents of the children performing to get these details correct.
7. There must be a musical or play where music is performed. Every Christmas and Summer term we would have a musical in my schools. It’s not that hard to put these on, there are all sorts of musicals available for primary schools. If you can’t afford one, borrow one from a neighbouring school. You might even be able to borrow costumes at the same time. The school play should be an occasion where music, drama and dance are combined. All students should be involved.
8. There must be an annual musical trip. All children should be able to see an orchestra, choir, concert band or any other ensemble. If you can’t hear a professional band or bring one into school, support your secondary school ensembles and bring your children to watch them perform. I remember seeing my local secondary school orchestra playing when I was in Year 5 and it was very inspirational.
9. All children must listen to music. Lots of schools have music as the children enter for assembly. One headteacher I worked with insisted on having the same song played every week when she did assembly. This was a waste of an opportunity – why listen to the same song 36 times a year, year in, year out? Some schools have a “Composer of the Week”. I also like “Genre of the Week” where one week you have country, the next samba, heavy metal, classic rock etc. You can find this music on YouTube or Spotify for free if you don’t have any CD’s.
10. All children must create music. I am not a big fan of composition in primary schools – I think it is better taught in secondary and the priority should be learning to play instruments in primary. However, I do believe that all children should be given an opportunity to create music while they are in primary school. But not every lesson.

This is the bare minimum that schools should be doing. I have seen this happen in even the smallest of village schools so it is certainly practically possible. This can work with a fifty pound annual budget – I’ve had to make do with less than this in the past! But you do need time and I realise this is the scarcest commodity in schools. In June or July, you should get out the school calendar and book a meeting with your headteacher and plan the musical events so they can be published at the start of the next school year. Please give these opportunities to the children in your schools – many of them really want to perform music and I think they have a right to have good musical education while they are in primary school.

This post is about how I go about composing music.  Not everyone will work the same way but I see composition as a step by step process of making decisions.  There is nothing magical or mystical about it; it’s like building a new Lego model based on many, many other models that you have built before with the instructions.  It is the culmination of a series of decisions.  Here is how I composed a song for our Early Years production called “Have you Ever Seen a Goat?”

1. Think of context. The musical I was writing the music for was entitled “The Duck in the Truck” so I read the book.  The goat in the story is lazing around in his motor-boat sleeping in a hammock.
2. Think of setting. When I thought of sleeping in a boat in the sunshine I imagined tourists taking a Spanish siesta in the Mediterranean.
3. Think of style. I thought we could make it a Spanish sounding flamenco song based on Point 2.
4. Think of instrumentation. This meant I should compose the music on the guitar rather than the piano.
5. Think of instrumental technique. I tried playing flamenco-type music on the guitar.  I wasn’t very good at it as my guitar playing is pretty basic – I am primarily a pianist.  I made up some sort of strumming style that sounded a bit like flamenco.
6. Think of tonality. I tried to make it sound a bit like bull-fighting so I played some chords in a minor key like you hear in the movies.  I thought of the music in the film “The Mask of Zorro” as it sounds Spanish/Mexican.
7. Think of instrumental/vocal range. After thinking about Catherine Zeta Jones and epic sword fights, I thought about the range of the children’s voices in Early Years and made sure that we were no lower than a B and no higher than a top D.
8. Think of key. I decided that we would do this one in E minor as the last few songs I wrote were in D and C.
9. Think of harmony. I played around with a few chords and stuck with Em, D and C major 7.  It sounded a bit flamenco-like and imagined Catherine Zeta Jones dancing around with a sword.
10. Think of melody. I whistled a few tunes to the chords to see if anything fit.
11. Think of lyrics. I realized I was procrastinating and thinking way too much about Catherine Zeta Jones so thought about some words to the song.  They had to be relatively simple, use the story as much as possible and use basic rhyming words as that is the focus in Early Years.
12. Think of phrasing. I decided on a question as the first words so the music could rise when we got to the question mark and then fall the second time around.  I had done something similar before and this is a technique used in many styles of music.
13. Think of context of lyrics. The question I thought of was “Have you ever seen a goat, floating on a boat, watching the waves go by” as that was portrayed by the picture in the book.
14. Think of second phrase. I then needed an answering phrase so I settled on “Have you ever seen a goat, floating on a boat, gazing at the big, blue sky”.
15. Practice to mastery. I then played this over and over about 14 times and sang and whistled a melody that fitted over the top till I was happy with how the words scanned and how the melody was shaped.
16. Think of alternatives. I checked the range of the tune and was happy with it.  It did start on a low B, which is about the lowest note I can use for Early Years, and I considered changing the key to F minor but as this is a nightmare key for the guitar I decided to stick with E minor, especially as I love playing the chord of C major 7.
17. Think of the structure. With young children you really need to keep a pretty distinct structure so I decided on an AABA format.
18. Think of a new section. I then tried to make a section B.  I decided it should be about the goat being very lazy because that was the character of the goat and I know that character-based drama is better than plot-driven drama so I could do the same for music.
19. Think about new lyrics. I played around with a few chords and came up with something – “Lazy, very lazy, sleeping in his hammock getting lots of rest”.
20. Think about existing music. I was a bit worried about this as it sounded very familiar.  I wondered if I had written something similar before.  I hadn’t.  My next thought was what have I plagiarized this from?  I decided it was a bit similar to a 1980’s worship song we had sung in church.  I wondered whether it was too similar to put in.  I recalled the song where I thought I had cribbed it from and thought it was a bit similar in style but the notes were completely different and it certainly wasn’t flamenco, more like Israeli klezmer music.
21. Think about adding a new phrase. Having decided the material was OK to use, I made the second phrase, “Lazy, very lazy, relaxing, chillaxing is what he likes best”.
22. Think about audience, venue and culture. Most readers will be familiar with the word “chillaxing”; it’s what David Cameron the British Prime Minister is always being accused of.  I imagined the PM as a lazy goat in his posh motor-boat and thought that the teachers might chuckle at the reference.  Originally I thought perhaps I should not put this in as technically it is not really a word but then thought Roald Dahl got away with this all the time so why not?  I decided to leave it in.  Sorry PM.
23. Think of transitions. I then needed to get back to section A.  I had finished on an imperfect cadence so I did a strangish bar-chord movement down the guitar with no particular notes in mind.  I thought the children might find that funny and it would be even funnier if I put a pause in just before it.  They would all be waiting for the strange bar movement and I could keep them waiting so they would all be looking straight at me, ready to sing.
24. Think of different instrumentation. I then thought that in the show performance I would have to play this on a piano so what should I do?  I decided that I would use a descending glissando instead.
25. Think of the ending. I then put all the song together and thought about how to end it.  I decided to repeat the last line twice which is an easy way to end a song and I had done this many times before.
26. Think of an innovation. I liked the song but it seemed a little bland at the end. I thought I needed something a little different, as it was too formulaic.  One thing that I know I do very well is creating good endings, so I spend quite a bit of time getting this right.  I wondered what I should do to end the song a bit innovatively.
27. Think of theoretical techniques. From my A-Level harmony lessons we had come across techniques known as augmentation and diminution.  Augmentation is when you make the notes longer.  I decided to make them exactly twice as long.  I then slowed down right to the last note sung and on the last note went back to the original tempo.  For the first time in my life I thanked the atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg who used augmentation and diminution in his tone rows, where I had first learned the technique.
28. Think of the final cadence. I ended the song with a perfect cadence with just the guitar in triumphant, flamenco style. I even thought of putting an “O Lay!” at the end but decided against it as the last time I did this, this kids were a nightmare saying it all the time in the wrong places.
29. Think of the introduction. It is always best to leave the introduction till the end as you have material you can use.  In fact, many musical introductions are simply the final phrase so you need the ending before you can have the beginning.
30. Practice to mastery. I then played the song about 14 more times until I was happy about it.

This does not include the whole scoring and recording process which is still part of composition.  In those stages the song changed slightly as I had to formalize it so another musician would be able to play the music.  I also tidied up some of the rhythms so it would score well.

For a very simple song I had to make at least thirty decisions; imagine what it’s like for a symphony!  This is also why I am so unsure about composition being central to the Primary curriculum.  Composition done well is very hard and needs an awful lot of thought.  It is certainly not impossible for children to achieve; some children will just get it and not have to think too hard.  However, others really need to be explicitly taught what to do and this is why I think it is inappropriate for Primary-aged children.  Half the problem is that the tasks that children are often asked to do in composition lessons in KS1, 2 and 3 require group decision-making and it is hard enough to make one decision on your own rather than decide together and argue about it.  We seem to think group decision making is easier as many hands make light work.  It is not, composing collaboratively is even harder in my experience unless one person writes the lyrics and the other writes the music.  And if you are the one writing the lyrics, it’s hardly a Music lesson.

To compose well you need to play an instrument fluently; without being able to play the guitar relatively competently, there is no chance I could have composed that song.  Also, many of the decisions I made to write the song were based on things that I had played and heard before.  This is why I believe that if we focus on performing, aural skills and listening to a wide range of music children will become better composers.  Time spent composing is time lost on performing and listening and paradoxically won’t necessarily make them better at composing.  Being a better performer will.  There is no merit in letting children flounder at the beginning trying to create music that they are ill-prepared to make.  Let’s spend the time performing instead and bring in composition a little bit later where they will flourish.

Here is the song:

Have You Ever Seen A Goat final

I am learning the clarinet at the moment so I was looking for tutor books in order to teach myself.  I nearly bought a book with a CD but then I realised that I no longer have a CD player because I play everything on Spotify now.  So I thought, maybe there is a tutor book on the iBooks store with the backing tracks already on it?  And there was.  And it’s really good.  I just put the iPad on the table and connect it to the Bluetooth player for a good clear sound.  Every song has a track you can play along with.  Here is one of the pages:

It was about 6 pounds, so not too expensive at all and no more fiddling around with CD’s and music stands.  I also bought a viola iBook because I need to learn alto clef properly as I still play the viola like a violin.

This would be a good resource to get for schools who have a “Bring your own iPad” scheme combined with a First Access (what used to be known as Wider Opportunities) class instrumental program.  Parents could each buy the book for 5 or 6 pounds for use at home and teachers could use the resource on the IWB and teach multiple instruments at the same time.  I know a lot of schools use Charanga, but this is a viable alternative and could work well.  I would be very interested to hear from any teacher who is already doing this.

The other thing I have found by learning the clarinet is how knackering practice can be when you are a beginner.  I was really running out of puff on one song and my mouth was a vibrating mess so I asked a few friends who were clarinettists why I was so rubbish.  They told me it was perfectly natural and it will take time to build up muscles in your mouth, so its best to only practice for ten minutes at a time.  Learning a new instrument is good for music teachers as it makes us understand what it is like to start from scratch.  I had certainly forgotten how hard it is to start – perhaps I will have more empathy with my students as a result!

This is the last in the rhythm unit of work for Year 2.  So far, the children have done Superhero, Transformer, Rondo, Composer and Tasty Rhythms.  Instrumental Rhythms is the last in the series.  The final set of rhythms is on families of the orchestra; String Rhythms, Woodwind Rhythms, Brass Rhythms and Percussion Rhythms.  Through this lesson children will learn to identify orchestral instruments in the four families.  The rhythms are written in pitch order from high to low.  There are no new rhythms in this lesson but we do have a triplet in one, to remind the children of what we did in the last lesson.  The rhythms will be played on tambourines, lollipop drums, maracas and, for a change, sand blocks as we have not used these instruments and we happen to have a set of eight in the department.

Although this is the last in the series, this is not the last time we will encounter these rhythms.  I will use them as a starter in next terms unit, but we will just clap them.  If you don’t keep revisiting the rhythms they will easily get forgotten.  It is also best to interleave practising the rhythms as it is one of the best ways of securing a concept into long-term memory.  So every other week we will go through a set of these rhythms just as a short, two minute activity.

There is a lot in this weeks lesson.  The names of the instruments, what they look like, their timbre, their pitch and the rhythms themselves.  Consequently, I will spend a lot of time going through this before we start.  A good website I have used in the past is the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra page for children.  We will go through all the instruments mentioned in the rhythms using this site before we play anything.  The children in my classes are quite familiar with orchestral instruments as every week the last thing we do is listen to four instruments and work out what instrument it is from the sound.  They are also familiar with the names of the families as we go through them every lesson too.  Just a minute or so doing this every lesson can have a massive cumulative effect.

Next half term’s work is on timbre so this is a good short introduction into instruments and how they can be used and combined.

Here are the pdf’s of the Instrumental Rhythm set:

Percussion Rhythms

String Rhythms

Woodwind Rhythms

Brass Rhythms

Orchestral Rhythms

 

 

I haven’t read the new white paper on education yet as it is hot off the press but the gist of what is happening in UK schools is that every school will become an academy by 2020. Petitions have been started, information (and misinformation) being passed around on Facebook and Twitter and it is all going a bit crazy.  Perhaps I am being completely naive but I am really not that bothered about school structures; it always seems to be about teachers discussing who is in charge and who gets to boss who around.  In my experience working in all sorts of different schools, there is always someone who wants to boss you around and as I actually know what I am doing, I just wish they would leave me to it and enjoy the results of happy well-educated children and contented parents.

The biggest change that will affect teachers that has hardly been reported on, is that by turning every school into an academy the government has basically got rid of the National Curriculum.  Well everything that isn’t examined to be more precise.  This is because academies are not obligated to teach the N.C. and if every school becomes an academy, there would be no compulsion to have to follow it.  This seems a bit odd as they only made a new curriculum two years ago.

In music education, teachers are continuously trying to justify why the subject should exist in the first place and how it should be taught (there are so many different music schemes and they are hugely different) but actually there is very little attention to what is getting taught.  If you go by the National Curriculum for Music, very little – it fits onto two sides of A4. So that’s why I am in two minds about the academies plan, as although the Curriculum was incredibly basic, at least there actually was one.  I guess the ghost of the N.C. will linger on as it will still be there lurking in the netosphere but we can choose to ignore it or give it the finger.  If that’s the case it hardly makes for something truly national but as long as we can just get on with teaching music properly I’ll be happy.

This is a continuation of the Year 2 unit on rhythms.

“Composer Rhythms” was a bigger hit than I could have imagined.  I only wanted to give a very brief overview of the eight composers, just to get across the idea that a composer is someone who writes music.  However, the children were absolutely fascinated by them and had so many questions.  Here are a few: “Was Beethoven born deaf or did he become deaf?”, “Did Liszt get married?”, “Did Bach die before Mozart?”.  I took the opportunity to play them a humorous version of Beethoven’s Fifth which they loved:

Anyway, we managed to perform the Composer Rhythms and they were so much more settled at getting into their groups now we have a routine.  To get their attention after they move from group to group I have been playing some rhythms which they copy on their instruments.  It’s a much better way of getting eventual silence rather than shouting out “STOP!’.  I have got a little bell on my table and I am going to try that to signal that we are ready to start the next set of rhythms.

The next stage in our rhythm learning is to increase their length, so the children are reading more notation and thinking harder about the note values.  So far, apart from the rondo, everything has been a one bar phrase.  This time we are performing two bars of 4/4. Here they are:

I have called them in turn; Vegetable Rhythms, Fruity Rhythms, Meaty Rhythms and Sweet Rhythms.  We will talk a little about food and healthy choices and a balanced diet as a cross-curricular link.  I thought hard about the triplet on the “strawberry’ and I thought why not – let’s teach them this new rhythm. Here is the carousel diagram:

Like last week I am going to use maracas, tambourines, woodblocks and lollipop drums.

Here are the files that anyone is very welcome to download and print:

Fruity Rhythms

Meaty Rhythms

Sweet Rhythms

Vegetable Rhythms

 

 

This is a continuation of our Year 2 work on rhythm.  So far we have done Superhero rhythms, Transformer rhythms and Composer rhythms.  The children are much better at the activities now they have settled into their groups; they know the carousel procedure, where they start and where they end.  As I put the rhythms on stands in the four corners of the rooms, they do not need me to say their rhythm, they read it on the stand and start playing together even before we start the activity.  Now they are used to playing in turn I am going to add a new element – a rhythm we all play together which recurs after every section.  In musical terms what I am introducing is rondo form or ABACADA form, where section A (the rondo) keeps returning.  We all play the rondo together.  Here it is:

We say it together as “fly, fly, spider, fly, caterpillar, spider, fly, hey!”  On the rest everyone stops except someone who plays the cymbal and we all shout “hey”.  The children like this bit a lot!

The rhythms are all repeated four times and after the fourth time we all come back with the rondo.  Here are the other rhythms:

This activity works well, it is an extension of the other rhythm activities as it adds the element of structure as well as some semiquavers.  It is also a good opportunity to teach children how to use the guiros properly and to tell them the proper name rather than “scraper”.

Here are all the rhythms as a pdf.  Feel free to download and print.

Rhythms with repeated figure

 

So after the Superhero and Transformer rhythms it’s time for something a little more high-brow, so we now have Composer rhythms. This is a good opportunity to use the word “composer” and understand what it means and give a little introduction to some of these famous personalities. It is also beneficial for children to think that music is not just something that happens now but has happened for many, many years. Most the children I’m teaching don’t even know what a CD is, as everything is on iPads, Spotify and YouTube so it’s an opportune moment to explain how people heard music in the past.  I tell them about CD’s, tapes, vinyl records, reel-to-reel tape, gramophones and what people had to do before recording was invented. After my little introduction we play the rhythms. I do make a little joke about my “Chopin Liszt” of groceries I need to write down before I go home.

For this activity, I have Haydn and Mendelssohn on the woodblocks, Beethoven and Mozart on the lollipop drums, Chopin and Liszt on drums and cymbals and Bach and Tchaikovsky on the triangles and tambourines. I have always wanted to write that sentence – it will probably be considered heresy by most classical musicians but there we go! We perform the same carousel just like the other rhythms.

Here are the rhythms as pdf’s if you want to download them:

Bach Tchaikovsky

Beethoven Mozart

Chopin Liszt

Haydn Mendelssohn

 

I am not that keen on backing tracks unless they are only used for rehearsal purposes. A friend of mine said that at his son’s school they use backing tracks for public performance. Normally, on a CD there will be a vocal backing track and a track without vocals. The idea is that you will use the vocals for rehearsals and the backing for a public performance. However, my friend said that his school used the vocal track for their performance. So what the audience heard was not even only their own children singing!  The excuse given is so the children sing more confidently as the vocal track will help support them. However, if the children never hear themselves singing as a group without support, they will not know how to take responsibility for their own performance. Too much support results in poor performance and poor learning outcomes.

So what are the alternatives?  First, accompany children with live music. Most people think that this has to be done on a piano. It doesn’t – in many ways a guitar is a better instrument to accompany children as you support them with chords. If you use a piano you are tempted to play the tune in the right hand. This gives the children too much support of the melody. If you accompany on a guitar then the onus is on the children to sing the melody properly. If you accompany on a piano it is good to miss bits out so you only hear the children singing. Like many things in life, less is more.

If you are going to be a little more ambitious and use drums or congas in your accompaniment then you really need a bass guitar as well. If you have a good pianist you can get them to play the bass or even split a keyboard so the top half is piano and the bottom half is a bass guitar sound. You do need the bass if you are going to go for a full live instrumental accompaniment otherwise the sound will just be too top heavy.

If you listen to any recorded music on a CD or MP3 and pick out the most prominent parts you will find they invariably feature in this order:

1. Lead vocals
2. Bass
3. Backing vocals
4. Drums
5. Guitar
6. Keyboards

In school performances when live music is featured, invariably the teacher in charge of the mixer (who normally knows next to nothing about sound) boosts the sound of the piano as they think it is the most important instrument. The resulting mix will inevitably sound groundless. If you are playing in a largish hall you need to have the bass at a much higher level to effectively ground the performance.  Also, if children cannot hear the bass they find it harder to sing the melody. So either use only piano, only guitar or if you are going for a full accompaniment with percussion – piano/guitar, drums and bass. I would also suggest that if you are going to rehearse with full band you also invite the person mixing the music to rehearsals too.

Most schools do not have these luxuries though and have either one accompanist or none. If you do not have an accompanist I suggest you advertise or ask your local High School if they have anyone on staff, or a talented pupil who can accompany your children. My music teacher started his career as a 15 year old organist for a local church choir; if he had not had that experience he probably would not have got the organ scholarship at Durham Cathedral when he went to Durham University. The experience he gained from accompanying the choir was priceless. Rather than using backing tracks, we should be spending a little time looking around our communities to see if we can support young musicians. For a musical I once wrote, I enlisted some parents to play guitars, flutes, bass and drums. It worked out well and some parents who had not played for many years got back into playing music as a result. If your school has no accompanist, send a letter out to your parents. You’ll never know what hidden talents are out there if you don’t ask.

If you really must use backing tracks for public performance, please stop using YouTube. When people download these tracks they come out very low quality. There is a great website called karaoke-version where you can make custom backing tracks of songs that do not lose the sound quality. There is a huge library of them too. The beauty of this site is you can change the key of songs to fit your voices. Often when backing tracks are used, the songs are a tone and half too high for the children if it features a male soloist. The music industry of today generally favours high tenors and Adele-like altos belting out tunes in chest voice so it is quite difficult to find music in an optimal key for primary school children to sing properly in their head voices. If you get children to belt everything out in chest voice you can actually do some vocal damage and it is not good for initial singing technique.

There is a role for backing tracks but more and more I am seeing professional music teachers using these tracks when they could be accompanying using an instrument. I have heard the argument that you can focus more on the children if you are not playing and can put in actions for songs. Having the freedom to teach children well by using technology has merit, but in public performance it is always better to have live accompaniment. It sounds fresher, is more emotionally fulfilling and the children always sing much better. I believe that children need to understand that music does not come from a box or an iPod and it requires skill and practice. What better way to show this than to have live accompaniment.

This is a continuation of my rhythm unit of work for Year 2. We played the Superhero rhythms last week and that worked well and now we are on our Transformer rhythms. Next week is Classical Music Composer rhythms. The idea of this series is to have four groups of instruments and the children play them in a carousel going round the four corners of the room.

Every week we have the same groups so they get the chance to gel together over time. I am not a great fan of group work in general as it normally turns into group non-work but this is an opportunity for children to play a variety of rhythms on instruments in a structured manner. In this activity each group plays the same rhythm together and each rhythm is played independent from the others. Generally, what does not work is when group work becomes a free for all and children play rhythms with no sense of actual pulse in their own time.  This approach fails because it is impossible to hear what you are playing with so many other sounds present in the room.  This results with children understandably playing louder and louder so they can hear their part above the cacophony.  And this is what leads to music teachers becoming deaf and losing their voice, upset children sticking their fingers in their ears and frustration all around.

For a class of 28 children you will need four sets of seven lollipop drums, seven tambourines, seven woodblocks and the other a mixture of cowbells/triangles and cymbals (the cowbells/triangles play “Optimus” and the cymbals play “Prime”. Like the Superhero rhythms, the activity takes about 15 to 20 minutes to complete. It’s a fun introduction to standard rhythmic notation and because we do a similar structured activity every week for six weeks, we get the chance to have time for repeated practice, which of course is the path to mastering anything competently.

Here are the four rhythms.  Feel free to download and print out if you would like to try the activity.

Bumblebee Ironhide

Optimus Prime

Sideswipe Sunstreaker

Thundercracker Megatron

  
This is a continuation of my series of reviewing old songbooks for the Primary Music classroom.

This is a Nursery Rhyme songbook published by A & C Black.  There are 66 songs and rhymes and most of them are very well known.  When I tell people that my aim in KS1 is to learn over 100 songs off by heart, they often think I am being too ambitious.  However, I would bet that most people know at least 50 of the 66 and most of these they will have learned at home, in nursery or in Key Stage 1 when they were little.  This book has all the old favourites, it’s well laid out and there is a CD available.  However, the beauty of nursery rhymes is that you should sing them unaccompanied – one of the objectives of the National Curriculum for Music.

It is interesting how society has changed and some of the songs are uncomfortable for modern ears.  Here are a few un-PC examples:

1. Little Tom Tucker cannot possibly get married unless he has a wife
2. Jill gets whipped by her mother for grinning at Jack’s misfortune from falling down the hill
3. Little Johnny Green drowns cats in a well
4. Neglecting a baby by putting it in the boughs of a tree is perfectly fine and not a serious health and safety hazard when it breaks and falls
5. Georgie Porgie has inappropriate contact with young girls
6. A farmer’s wife runs around mutilating visually impaired mice by chopping off their tails
7. Tom the piper’s son steals a pig and then is beaten down the street
8. If you don’t say your prayers you will be grabbed by your left leg and thrown down the stairs
9. You might get beheaded if you frequent certain churches in London
10. Jemima gets whipped emphatically by her mum for yelling and screaming
11. Old Mother Hubbard’s dog starts smoking a pipe
12. Blatant misandry where girls are full of everything nice and boys made of frogs and snails and puppy dog tails.  

Some people think we should get rid of these songs because of the content but nursery rhymes have a long history and many were written to respond to historical and political events.  I do think that we should learn them off by heart as it is important to keep this tradition going and in later years teachers will make reference to some of them in history and English literature classes.  Also, if you don’t know them you simply will not get many of the inferences people make which refer to them.  ED Hirsch Jr. has written about the importance of “cultural literacy” when it come to comprehension; if you don’t know some of these old songs, rhymes and sayings, you will not be able to understand many inferences in newspapers and academic publications.

Musically, some songs are fiendishly difficult.  For example “Sing a song of sixpence” has a melody that goes all over the place.  The pitch does not move by step and has quite an extensive range with some difficult intervals.  I would save this song until Year 2 when hopefully most children can sing in tune.  If you try to get Early Years children to sing this song what often happens is they just say the rhythm.  This needs to be discouraged as this is why you end up with the “growlers” and children labelled “monotone” or “tone deaf”.  There is such a thing as “tone-deafness”, or amusia as it is known in the music profession but it only affects a very small proportion of individuals.  The amount of adults who go up to me and say they are tone-deaf is unreal.  I have to explain that they are probably not tone-deaf, they just weren’t taught to sing properly when they were young.  This is a good reason why we should be teaching the Kodaly pitch system in Early Years so that children can access some of these more melodically challenging songs in Key Stage 1.  The rule of thumb when choosing songs for young children is to keep it between middle C and high C, try not to have many leaps and start by selecting songs with a “so me” pattern to help children find their singing voice.

To go back to the review of this book, if you want a collection of nursery rhymes this is a good songbook to have in your Music department.  You will know most the songs but there are interesting second and third verses of nursery rhymes that you won’t be familiar with, so there is some extension material for all – even teachers.

Here is the index:

  

 

We are very fortunate to have a world class piano teacher at our school.  When I mean world class, I really do mean it literally, her students consistently win international piano competitions and the standard of performance from all her students is exceptional.  You can even tell which children are her students simply by the way they sit at the piano and how they take a bow.  I have asked to visit her every Friday morning to see what she does and how she gets very young children to obtain such high standards.

The main point I took from today’s half an hour lesson with a six-year old student is the attention to detail.  For example, she has a special pedal board for the children so their legs and feet are still if they are too small to put their feet on the floor.  She has special piano shoes that she keeps in her room as their normal shoes are sometimes inappropriate for using the pedal.  She insists on a very good posture and helps with their arm movement as they go up and down the keyboard.  She marks exactly where children should put their fingers on the piano by using a pencil on the keys.  All these very fine details add up to make exceptional performance.

Another other thing I took away from today is the importance of the metronome.  All children have a metronome at home and she asks them to remember exact numbers for each piece they are practicing as well as their scales.  These are incredibly precise – one piece the student was playing at 60 bpm and she said it was too fast and so changed it to 58.  Most teachers would barely recognize the difference.

Finally, there is the sheer ambition of the repertoire she asks young children to play.  This little six-year whose fingers are half the size of mine, is preparing for a piano concerto that she will play with a string orchestra in a concert on stage with a large audience.  And it is not easy, in fact one of the passages I would have to really think hard about and practice slowly as technically it is around Grade 5/6 standard.  The little girl plays four octave scales and then one where in D major you play the scale that turns into contrary motion then back into a scale again then ends with a perfect cadence.  She does chords in root position, first inversion and second inversion as well as arpeggios, both hands together for four octaves.  She plays chromatic scales both hands together for four octaves.   It is very impressive and remember, this girl is six and is around four feet tall.

We are currently studying rhythm with Year 2. I have made some simple rhythms using a theme of superheroes. I put them in the four corners of the room with a music stand in each corner and the pictures which you can find at the end of this blog post. One corner has lollipop drums, another has tambourines, another woodblocks and there are cymbals and triangles for “Hulk – smash”. Each group plays their rhythms four times, then it moves immediately to the next group that does the same and so on. I play a simple bass ostinato on the piano to keep them in time but this can be performed unaccompanied, to a drum beat or a very loud electronic metronome. After “Hulk smash” they move in a carousel to the next corner of the room until they have done all four rhythms using different instruments. The task takes about 15 minutes and is very noisy. I suggest you bring ear-plugs or headache tablets if you want a go at this activity! I am keeping the structure the same next week but with different rhythms – Transformers next time. I will keep the groups the same so the children get used to playing with one another. The week after we will go all classical and perform the names of some famous composers.

This is a good way to get children to perform together, keep in time, use a selection of instruments, read rhythmic notation, develop tinnitus and have some noisy fun. We just need a few more cymbals in the room as I am sure the Hulk would not put up with playing the triangle when he’s angry.

Feel free to use the resources below.

Spiderman Ironman

Hulk smash

Superman Batman

Wonderwoman Phoenix

      

Continuing my series of reviewing old, yet good singing books for the Primary Music classroom.

“Flying Around” is a book of rounds.  There are 88 in all but I use only a small amount of them.  There is a good selection, with songs that could be used from Key Stage 1 all the way to Key Stage 4.  My favourites are “Make new friends”, “Canoe song”, “Sandy Mc Nab”, “Kookaburra”, “I like the flowers”, “Shalom”, “Land of the silver birch”, “Come and sing together”, “Calypso”, “Mrs. O’Leary’s lantern” and “Junkanoo”.

I use them in choir and in lessons.  I have found it works best when you physically put children into three or four groups in the corners of the music room and have two leaders for each group.  They seem to struggle with this for Year 1 but with time they get used to it, and in Year 2 there are not too many difficulties.  I normally just have two-part rounds for Year 1 and then move to three and four-part rounds for Year 2.  If you don’t have a pianist for your choir, this can be difficult to direct; this is why choir always works best with either a pianist accompaniest or a second helper.  The suggested ostinatos in the book are quite useful although I sometimes make up my own on tuned percussion. They keep the children in time as long as you have some individuals who can play well to a steady beat.

I always have a round or two in every choir practice.  It is one of the best ways to prepare children for part singing, and also is a very good way of encouraging children to sing together in time.  When they are really confident, perform them unaccompanied.  I don’t do any part singing until Year 3 when we start some simple two part pieces.  I will blog in the future about “Banana Splits”, a good book to use with material to get children into part singing.  That is probably the next step up from “Flying A Round”, although there is plenty of overlap.

Every now and again you will find a song in a children’s song book that you cannot quite believe is actually in there.  Sometimes it’s quite well known, you have sung it,and you just haven’t thought about the words.

Here is one I have found in the book “Apusskidu”:

  
A song about having lots of fun with gin and rum and how when you think it’s time to stop getting wasted you’d better have another sip from the little brown jug.

There’s even an ostinato pattern….

The general principle in music is “the sound before the symbol”.  Where music educators go wrong is when they just do symbols, just do sounds, or do not explicitly show how sound and symbol correlate.  So before starting rhythm work it is good to start with copying games to warm up our minds.  This is as far as some teachers go in Key Stage 1 and in my opinion, is way, way not far enough.  All Key Stage 1 pupils are capable of recognising and playing a whole variety of basic rhythms.  They just need to be taught what they sound and look like and have time to practice them over weeks with spaced practice further ahead in the school year (this goes for most stuff to do with education too!)

It is good to use instruments to achieve this purpose.  Clapping is fine but playing instruments properly is a requirement of music lessons so let’s use them when teaching rhythm.  Claves are good too, woodblocks a bit piercing, but in my experience, the best instrument to play rhythms shorter than a crotchet is the lollipop drum.

  

I had three lollipop drums at the beginning of the year but I managed to get the boss to buy me four more which was very useful.  Eventually I would want around 12-15 so we could do paired work with them.  

Once you can copy and play rhythms on instruments, the next stage is simple notation.  A task I start in Year 1 is the rhythm clock.  Here it is:

 
I first saw this on the MTRS website and I have used it in Key Stage 1-3 ever since.  I should not have to use it in Key Stage 3, but honestly so many children had not come across these basic crotchet and quaver patterns in Primary School so you have to go back to the very basics.  That’s another discussion for another blog post.  There are loads of activities you can do with the clock; recognising rhythms, playing rhythms and I get each child to play a rhythm individually and the class have to work out which one it is.  This gives me a good idea on who can do it and who can’t.  I also use it as an exit ticket to leave the classroom.  I put it on the window next to the door and say a number.  The child has to play the correct rhythm to exit.  If they do not succeed, they watch five pupils successfully do it and then have another go themselves.  Normally they get it after watching their peers.  I could go out to town and assess them all individually on this ability and then write it in their reports.  However, it’s a bit pointless because in time they all do get it and if I assess it immediately, it has no bearing if they have really learned it.  The only way you would know, is if they could do it independently at the end of the school year.  You just have to repeat the activity quite a few times in a row and then space it out over months so they have time to forget and then relearn and consolidate.  David Didau explains this very well in his latest book “What if everything you knew about education was wrong?”  The process of forgetting then relearning embeds these skills into long term memory and then it is hardly ever forgotten.

You would think that this would be easy.  There are only combinations of two different rhythms.  However, young children find this hard because it takes quite a lot of time to fully understand the difference between beat and rhythm and their concept of a steady beat is not always fully formed aurally by Year 1.  This takes time and why the first term of Year 1 is spent trying to focus on keeping a steady beat.  We call the rhythms “fly” and “spider”, the difficulty is when some children say “spider” but play “fly” – a confusion between beat and rhythm.  I tell them the “der” is as important as the “spi” but they still find it quite hard.  I have thought about going down the pure Kodaly route and calling crotchets “ta” and quavers “tee tee” – that would probably solve the problem but we learn so many rhythms using the mini-beasts such as “caterpillar” for semi quavers, “ladybird” and “grasshopper” that it is a shame to go down the dry route of “ta’s” and “tee’s”.  I might do an experiment and have one class doing pure Kodaly and one doing the mini-beasts and see which class does best in future years.

I use the lollipop drums so children can get into pairs and play the game together.  You really need to think the pairs out carefully in advance and pair up high ability with low ability.  It is frustrating for the high ability children but it’s a quickish way of getting most children to a roughly equal standard when learning to play rhythms.  I would say that it is a 2/3 – 1/3 split in most classes when it comes to Y1 and playing basic rhythms.  I also give a copy of the clock out as homework so parents can play with their children and conquer any potential beat/rhythm misunderstanding. 

Currently, I have to supplement the lollipop drums with woodblocks as I don’t have enough lollipop drums but the children find blocks a bit more difficult to manipulate as they don’t always have a handle, and every now and then we end up with a “hammer incident” when a child has whacked their fingers with a woodblock stick and there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Also the hard wooden beaters can really knock out your ears with a high pitched click which is why I like the lollipop drums with the soft beaters.  I hear enough high-pitched sounds daily, which means I am probably at least half way to tinnitus.  I have completed the task with every child holding two claves each and that works fine but it can hurt your hands hitting them together all the time.  When a class exits with red, sore hands it does not look very good, even if the children have smiles on their faces.  Tambourines are a mistake as it is so much harder to hear the differences with all that shaking everywhere.  I do use tambourines but later on when we have rhythms over the length of a crotchet.

Year 1 is the right time to start as the children are beginning to learn about telling the time and clocks in general so there are some good cross-curricular links.  Most children in Year 1 know there are 12 hours on a clock and know time goes round in a circle clockwise, but it is good to reinforce these concepts.  I sometimes play the game where we play all the rhythms anti-clockwise so they understand the difference between these two terms.  Maths teachers have never complained.  I will do these rhythms for about three weeks before moving on.  Most teachers then proceed to minims.  I don’t, I go onto semi-quavers “caterpillar” first because we can use the same instruments and the same principles as “flies” and “spiders”.  I have thought about telling them the proper names to the notes and I may change my approach in the future, but currently I save this terminology reveal towards the end of Year 2.

I have written some songs for the EY2 musical “The Duck in the Truck”.

Here they are:

Have You Ever Seen A Goat

How Now Mrs Brown Cow

Wandering Sheep

Jumping Frogs

Splish Splash Splosh

Duck in the Truck

 

These tiny books are actually very good.  Like all resources, some aren’t fantastic but many I use day in, day out in my lessons.  There are some very simple songs for young children, some accumulative songs, songs from around the world and there are some good rounds and singing games.  Mine came in a little file which is handy.  If you need a book if you aren’t that familiar with the song, they are easy to take with you for a reference.

Songs I use from the series:

1) Boom Chicka Boom

• Boom Chicka Boom – all ages
• The Hand Jive – Year 2 melody only, more parts for Years 3 and 4

2) Kumala Vista

• Kumala Vista – Year 3 and 4

3) Tongo

• Tongo – Year 3 and 4
• Clap, stamp, slap, click – Year 3 and 4
• Emmanuel – Year 3 and 4
• Shalom – Year 2
• Lazy Coconut Tree – Year 3

4) Popacatapetl

• Ooo a lay lay – Year 1
• Popacatapetl – Year 3 and 4
• Pizza Hut – Year 3
• A Young Austrian – Year 3
• Young Peter the Fiddler – Year 6

5) Tall Straw Hat

• I don’t use any songs from this book

6) Rock ‘n’ roll – a round?

• Rock ‘n’ roll – a round? – Year 6
• Junkanoo – Year 5
• Waters of Babylon – Year 6

7) Lost in Space

• Lost in Space – Year 6
• Soualle – Year 6
• Hewenu Shalom – Year 5 and 6

8) I’m gonna sing

• Canon in Swing – Year 6
• I’m gonna sing – Year 2 and 3
• Tina Singu – Year 5 and 6

9) Ghosts

• Ghosts – Years 2 and 3
• Dem Bones – Year 5
• Calypso – Years 3, 4 and 5

10) Bear Hunt

• Bear Hunt – Early Years

  

  

I am going to review some well used singing books.  Okki-tokki-unga is a pretty old singing book by the firm AC & Black.  It’s really good for young children and probably best for EY to Year 2.  There are great action songs, counting songs and some singing games.  The full index is here:

  
  
Some songs I would not use anymore as they have smoking in, or are a bit military in nature.  Most are great.  An essential book for the music classroom.

I was asked by someone to get my six and seven year olds to write a song.  There are some children who can do this.  Most cannot.  Writing a song is not as easy as you think.  The way to start teaching it is to replace words to existing songs.  One way of doing this is to take a song like “London Bridge is falling down” and change the material that we use to build it up.  For example, “build it up with chocolate bars”, “build it up with teddy bears” etc.  The children love this and with one and two syllable words they start to learn about melismas, using more than one note for one syllable. 

The next stage is to replace words of an entire song to make the meaning completely different.  So instead of “Going to the zoo”, we can change it to “going into space” and change the verses to things we could find in space rather than at the zoo.  This stage is a lot more tricky for children because not only do they need to independently think of things in space, they have to make it into a sentence and then make the sentence fit the music.  This is where most children fall to pieces.  You can do a half-way activity where you give the children three sentences and they have to choose which one fits the song the best.  This gives them the opportunity to sing the sentence to the music to see if it fits.  To do this you need a good sense of rhythm and pulse and an understanding of how the first beat of the bar is stressed and it is not necessarily the first word of a sentence.  These are incredibly difficult concepts for most children and the main reason why I don’t move onto this stage until at least Key Stage 2.  This is why I believe that the main aims of Key Stage 1 music must be rhythm, pitch, aural skills and a large repertoire of known songs and pieces.  It is difficult to write songs if you haven’t experience of how songs are structured.  The more songs children know, the better their understanding of song structure will be.  

The next stage should be left to Key Stage 3 for most children.  This is to create their own music for their song.  In order to do this you need to understand melody and probably harmony.  Some children can make up an independent melody for their words but what normally happens is they sing it to an existing song but don’t realise that is what they are doing.  If you want truly original work, the best thing to do is to make a simple chord sequence and then a melody can be sung over the top which fits.  This is why a basic knowledge of chord progressions and harmony is important to be able to write good songs and why you can’t really start it until you have started learning harmony.

And this is ultimately why asking seven year old children to write a song is not only a difficult thing to do but actually an unfair thing to do, as we are asking young children to do something they are simply not prepared for.  There are exceptions, there are some children who can write a song with little to no help.  But because of these exceptional children, we think all children should be able to do this when I have just shown how difficult an activity it really is.  If you really want to teach children songwriting, the best things to do are to learn an instrument like a ukulele, guitar or keyboard and learn how to construct simple chord sequences.  I would not be bringing in proper songwriting with original melodies and harmonies until Year 9.  There is nothing to stop younger children having a go and writing their own songs but it should not be an expectation for children to be able to do this until they have a good knowledge of melody and harmony.