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.

Daisy Christodolou said something very important in one of the Michaela debates about education.  She said that the debate between traditionalists and progressives was not “teacher-directed” vs “student-directed” but rather that traditional teachers were “knowledge-directed”.  The learning in a classroom should be directed by the best that has been thought and said, not by the whim of teachers or students.  The reason this is important is because progressives like to portray traditionalists as trying to control the learning in their classroom with students being passive recipients of what they say rather than critically thinking about what is said.  Knowledge-directed is something else, you can critically think about the best that has been thought and said – people have been doing this since at least the time of Socrates.

I have shared the aims of what I am trying to achieve in the music classroom and these are based on powerful knowledge.  With this knowledge, students are freed up to independently learn, become creative and critically think.  For example, being able to read notation means that the single biggest barrier to learning an instrument has been taken away.  Notation is a transferable skill, if you can read clarinet music, you can also read violin music.  Understanding the chronology of Western Art Music will help you understand why composers wrote what they did and what they were building on or rebelling against.  It is impossible to understand early 20th Century music without a good grounding in Romanticism, especially Wagner for this reason.  And of course, composition is much, much easier when you understand basic harmony.  The idea of composing with little knowledge of harmony is a big mistake.  Sadly, the main delivery method of composition in the KS2/KS3 classroom is without any prior knowledge of harmony.  And that is why in most cases, it is a complete waste of time.  

The best way to decide what knowledge you want to teach is to think what the children ought to be able to do and know by age x.  If you are really unsure, the Core Knowledge Curriculum by Civitas is a good start and has a pretty good list of music for music teachers to teach.  At the end of the year I will release my curriculum which has detailed lists of repertoire to sing and play for each year group.

Before you start to think about your repertoire you need to think about your aims.  My aims for Key Stage 1 are relatively straightforward.

1. To sing in tune
2. To develop the head voice
3. To sight-sing
4. To learn singing games
5. To learn songs that can be performed in public
6. To learn songs to continue an aural tradition

1. To sing in tune

This is easier than most teachers think. There are very few children who cannot sing in tune.  The reason you get the “growlers” and the “mumbles” is due to poor initial technique.  This is where the Kodaly method comes into play.  Start off with lots of singing games in the so-me and la range and this will help the children to sing in tune with one another.  I use “Little Sally Saucer” primarily to achieve this aim but there are many other songs that achieve this.  From then on I go straight into full tonic sol-fa starting from “do” to “ti”.  Some teachers disagree with this and choose songs that use the pentatonic scale first but I don’t as I prefer a fixed “do” system in my teaching for many other reasons that I will go into in a later post.

2. To develop the head voice

After fourteen years of teaching, I am only recently starting to understand the importance of children distinguishing between their head and chest voice.  Chest voice needs little explanation but head voice needs to be explicitly taught.  The way to do this is to sing “oohs” at ranges above top C.  Then progress to sirens swooping from high to low and back again.  Children find this fun.  I always knew this and did this in lessons but the one thing I did not know is how top cathedral choirs get that fantastic sound from the trebles.  I have learned that they choose songs that start high, or alternatively transpose everything up as high as they can.  Then little by little, they slowly bring the range down to try to get the children to sing as much as possible in head voice.  I have done this recently by using the songs “Bibbity Bobbity Boo” which starts high and only goes lower in the second line, and “Castle on a Cloud” where I have transposed the whole song up five semitones.  Most songs start low and then get higher so if head voice is your aim you need to think the other way around and choose repertoire where notes start high.

3. To sight-sing

Sight-singing is a neglected art.  I have started to develop this by putting the Kodaly hand signs on the board in a selection of songs that I call “The Mystery Tune”.  The children sing the mystery tune in tonic sol-fa and then have to guess what it is.  They really like doing this.  I pick well known songs they have sung before, like “The Bear Went Over The Mountain”, “Old Mac Donald”, “London Bridge” and “Twinkle, Twinkle”.  In Year 3, I start to gradually bring in the traditional staff notation.  Sight-singing in the UK is pretty dreadful, if you compare it to places like Hungary, you can see that high standards can be achieved.  In my experience, Year 2 children should be able to sight-sing a tune with a piano or guitar accompaniment.  In later years I would expect it to be done unaccompanied.

4. To learn singing games

As I have written in a previous post, singing games work and are the best ways of increasing enjoyment, participation and singing in tune.  A substantial part of my repertoire for Early Years and Key Stage 1 is based around singing games and this is reflected in the repertoire.

5. To learn songs that can be sung in public

An embarrassing consequence of my enthusiasm for singing games resulted in this aim.  Basically, we had done so many singing games that when we were asked to perform a song in public, I couldn’t think of anything to do.  It would be a bit weird to just play a game in front of the audience and I am sure they would enjoy seeing their children having so much fun but there are conventions that we need to observe and it is important for children of all ages to learn how to perform in front of an audience.  So now I teach songs that stand alone for public performance.  Most of these do have actions but some are just a straight song where the children stand tall and sing their hearts out to their loved ones in the audience.  I tell the children that they get lots of good things from their parents like nice food, being looked after when they are sick, play dates, toys and trips to the park and this is our way of saying “Thank you” to them.  Parents want children to sing to them and that is the best present ever.  They want to see smiles and a strong performance.  Finding the right songs can be tricky – our performance songs this year include “Tomorrow” from Annie, “Never Smile at a Crocodile” from Peter Pan, “Colours of the Wind” from Pocahontas, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz and the songs “You raise me up” and the Carol King song “You’ve got a friend”.  “Colours of the Wind” is the most challenging.  I have put it into our repertoire for this year but on reflection I think I am going to keep this for Year 3 and 4, as technically it is quite tricky and there are a lot of words to learn.

6. To learn songs to continue an aural tradition

This is probably the most controversial of my aims.  Many music teachers do not think this is important.  I do because we had a guest musician some years ago who asked the children to sing a simple nursery rhyme and the children did not know it.  I thought their parents would have taught it to them or they would have learned it in nursery but I learned this was no longer the case.  The power of pop and YouTube has resulted in songs that we knew from a young age now becoming obsolete.  This includes folk songs.  This is a shame because it does mean we lose part of our identity as a nation and also means we have no common reference between generations.  Consequently I teach songs such as “When a knight won his Spurs”, “The Skye Boat Song”, “Greensleeves” and folk songs from other nations such as “Waltzing Matilda” and “Cockles and Mussels”.  Nursery rhymes are important but can easily be learned by simply putting on nursery rhyme CDs at playtime or by singing throughout the school day.  I think we should use these opportunities to make sure “The Grand Old Duke of York” and “I had a little nut tree” don’t fade away with subsequent generations.

This all informs the repertoire I choose.  I have a list of songs we learn and I divide it up into six blocks to go with the school year.  This is a little more complicated than it sounds as I try to make them fit into themes.  For example, Year 1 are currently learning about pitch so I am putting songs like “Hot Cross Buns”, “The Grand Old Duke of York, “Happy Sun High” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” into this half terms repertoire as they all, in different ways, explore pitch and the concepts of high and low.  I think it is also very important to repeat songs, there is almost no value in learning a song only once which will be forgotten quickly.  All songs should be sung at least twice.  And, as with most learning, we need to revisit songs so that the brain has a chance to forget them and then relearn them.  This “spacing effect” solidifies learning.  Failure to space learning can result in the “Why they can’t do this?  I know I’ve taught them this!” phenomenum.  It’s not necessarily bad teaching, it’s just that the children have forgotten the material as there was no spaced practice.  This incidentally, is one of the reasons why the government is getting rid of modular examinations – students were learning a terms worth of work, cramming for the exams and then promptly forgetting it all.  Without modules you actually have to retain information over a longer period of time.

The end result is that I have a repertoire of well over one hundred and twenty songs and the expectation is that all children will remember them and sing them from memory by the age of 7.

  

When teaching early years, I often use three chimes when we talk about high, middle and low pitched notes.  I also get them to growl like the three bears.  This is with EY1 (3/4 year olds).

  

For EY2 we use Hot Cross Buns.
  

For Year 1 we use Rabbits to go with the Magic Rabbit Scheme.

  

This gets progressively harder.
  

And turns to staff notation in Year 2.
  

By the end of Year 2, all children should be able to play a five note tune using standard staff notation.

After six or more years of music lessons totalling approximately two hundred hours of class tuition, we should have some minimum expectations of what children can achieve in Music.  There is something officially written down – it is called the National Curriculum of England and Wales and it fits onto one page of A4.  Compare it to the Alberta curriculum and you should be embarrassed as the expectations in this province of Canada are far higher than anything we have in the U.K.  To be fair, you can say that the Alberta curriculum is very prescriptive and exact on what needs to be taught whereas the U.K. curriculum is a basic framework you adapt.  

As Music in the National Curriculum for England and Wales is so vague, most teachers adapt it, as you could probably teach the whole content in two or three weeks if you were competent.  I have made a curriculum for Key Stage 1 that is similar to Alberta, but also has the content of the U.K. Core Knowledge curriculum published by Civitas.  This, of course, fits the N.C. for England and Wales because it is hard not to, as it is so embarrassingly basic.  I will share it at the end of this year as I am still not happy with the final paperwork yet.  But I will share the basic aims.  Remember this is my expectations for the end of KS1, not KS2.

All students will know…

INSTRUMENT FAMILIES

1) The names of the four instrument families

2) At least four instruments in each family from sight and sound

3) How the instruments can combine and make different groups such as orchestras and bands

PITCH

4) To sing in tune

5) To sight-sing using tonic sol-fa and the first six notes of the treble clef

6) To sing in unison, in a round, in partner songs and as a solo or duet.

7) To play well known melodies on xylophones and glockenspiels using graphic notation and the first six notes of the treble clef

8) To play handbells from number and letter notation

9) To play at least four notes on a recorder including “E”

RHYTHM

10) To keep a steady beat

11) To read, clap and play rhythms using semibreves, minims, crotchets, quavers and semi quavers and rests

12) To play ostinatos

13) To combine rhythm and pitch

DYNAMICS

14) To play and understand music using the Italian terms fortissimo, forte, mezzo forte, mezzo piano, piano and pianissimo

15) To understand crescendos and diminuendos

TEMPO

16) To play music using different tempi using Italian terms such as presto, allegro, moderato, andante and adagio

17) To understand accelerando and rallentando 

SONG REPERTOIRE

18) To confidently sing the song repertoires of Early Years and Year 1 and 2 totalling over 100 songs

PERFORMANCE REPERTOIRE

19) To play over 30 short pieces of music on instruments

COMPOSITION

20) To have the opportunity to compose music individually and in pairs

COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY

21) To compose music using the program Dance EJ for schools

22) To compose music using an iPad

23) To record music using an iPad

PUBLIC PERFORMANCE

24) To take part in public performances including choirs, recorder groups, handbell groups, instrumental concerts, class assemblies and year group musical plays

LISTENING

25) To become aware of at least thirty pieces of well known classical music

26) To identify at least ten pieces of music from around the world by naming the country of origin

27) To listen to at least twenty pieces of music from the 20th and 21st century including Jazz, Country, Pop, Rock and Dance music

28) To listen to an orchestra playing live

29) To hear a public performance by professionals

AURAL SKILLS

30) To identify changes in pitch and rhythm

Can this be done?

Yes.  But your lessons need to be highly structured.  I do this by having the “Instrument of the Week” at the beginning.  This covers the majority of the listening repertoire and knowledge of instruments as each child will experience around 100 lessons before they leave KS1.  This takes five minutes of every lesson.  I then have “Rhythm Time”.  This takes about five minutes too.  By the end of Year 2, the children have the foundational skills of keeping in time and sight-reading rhythms.  We then have “Singing Time”.  This takes about ten minutes and we start with Kodaly warm ups and then go into two songs we know and one we don’t or only know a bit of.  We constantly revisit known songs so they become engrained into long term memory.  That covers the singing repertoire and most aural skills.  This all takes up the first twenty minutes of the lesson.

We then proceed into “Instrument Time”.  This is when we get instruments out to play tunes, read notation etc.  This covers most of the rest of the curriculum.  I try to keep composition to a minimum as composition skills are better taught in KS2 and above when the children have more experience playing instruments correctly and with precision.  I do teach some composition and put in improvisation too.  The limited amount of composition time is the most controversial element of my lessons.  It’s only controversial in the U.K. though!  All composition activities are highly structured and only ever performed individually or in pairs.  Small group composition never works well with KS1 students from my experience.  “Instrument Time” always takes the most time, about 20 minutes of every lesson.  

After we have packed away (and after “Inspection” to make sure it has been put away carefully), we have “Listening Time”.  I put up a short quiz of four instruments where the children have to work out the instrument from sound alone.  To do this requires a careful scaffold of information about instruments every single lesson.  It is only at the end of Y2 that it clicks with most children due to the constant exposure to the instrumental sounds they hear every lesson.  This is also useful as it serves to quieten the children down after the excitement of “Instrument Time”.  Again, this takes five minutes.  We then have “Performance Time”.  This is when any child can play their instrument to the rest of the class.  I then ask if anyone else wants to play next week.  My plans are to record these informal performances but I have not done this yet.  “Performance Time” happens in silence so we get used to really listening to what our classmates can play and the routine of listening to others in silence as a mark of basic respect.  I then finish the lesson (ours are 55 minutes long) with a recap of everything we have done in the lesson and what to look forward to in next weeks lesson.  Then we all line up for the “Password”.  This is the classic exit ticket for formative assessment so I know if they have been paying attention.  It’s normally a short tune or a rhythm that they have learned in “Instrument Time”.  If they can’t play it, they watch five other children doing it successfully then they try it out themselves.

I repeat this structure every lesson.  It’s quick paced and requires good time management but, my goodness, it works.  I have tried other ways of delivering lessons but all that happens is children do not retain the knowledge and skills over time.  The way I teach in this very structured manner works because the expectations are all known and valued by the students, the routines are engrained from very early on, and if they forget something over the week, they are constantly reminded every lesson.  Most music lessons are unsuccessful because they do not do this.  If you teach a subject that only occurs once a week then you will not have time to embed these skills before they get naturally forgotten.

Some music teachers will be horrified by this approach.  It is highly structured and the creativity police would probably have a fit as it is very teacher directed.  In fact it is close to 90% teacher directed.  But my kids leave Key Stage 1 knowing tons about music, they sing and they play really well and I have never had any complaints from parents or children.  In fact it’s the reverse – parents are always telling me how much their children love their music lessons.  

Traditional, old fashioned singing games work well in Primary Schools.  They are common all over the world and all children should know at least a dozen by the time you leave Year 6.  Kids absolutely love them but that’s not the point – they learn so much through singing them.  Firstly, the repetitive nature means that you are continuously singing.  Secondly, the songs you sing are being reinforced by the whole group, encouraging reluctant or shy singers.  Thirdly, you have to combine singing with action.  Fourthly, the pitches of many singing games are the ones which are most natural to children so help them to sing in tune.  Fifthly, there are social benefits that help children to learn to take turns.  Sixthly, they are common all over the world so children get to sing in other languages and learn songs from different cultures.  

The best way to learn them is to learn them off other people who already teach them.  I learned many from some fantastic colleagues but the best were from an INSET course we did with Ex Cathedra.  My attitude when Ex Cathedra came to visit us at our music service was appalling.  I had looked them up on the internet about 9 years ago and it said they were a posh choir from Birmingham.  I thought, what could this group of singers teach us about teaching young children when they sing Mozart’s Requiem in cathedrals?  I could not have been more wrong.  They were absolutely brilliant and the material was perfect for young children.  Most the songs were traditional singing games but some were composed by the team and they got the balance of engagement and good quality singing right.  I enthusiastically recommend them, and if you are thinking about bringing in a musical workshop, book them in.  I have done many, many music INSET days and they were the best by a long way.  They have a new publication and CD on their website if you would like to purchase it but in all honesty it really does not make sense without seeing how the games are taught in practice.

Where else can you find Singing Games?  The best publications are the Singing Games books created by the National Youth Choir of Scotland, Sing for Pleasure have many small books with them in – one is based on Polish singing games created by one of the education practitioners of Ex Cathedra.  Banana Splits , a book to help children learn to sing in parts has a few and there are a few from the Singing Sherlock series.  Some of the best places to find singing games are not from books but from people who know them – the guides, brownies and scouts have a tradition of singing games and are in most towns and villages.  Asking older members of society is also a good way to learn singing games – I was told a few by a headteacher who was nearing retirement and wanted to pass on the old traditions.  

To get you started, here are my favourite twelve singing games:

1. Little Sally Saucer – circle game for young children
2. Jump Jim Joe – partner song
3. John Kanackanacka – partner song
4. I hear the Bells – partner and group song in two parts
5. A Young Austrian – action game
6. Early in the morning – circle game
7. A sailor went to sea – partner clapping game
8. Hear the music – acting game
9. Copy Andrew – copying games that I wrote
10. Who stole my chickens and my hens? – competitive circle game
11. Here comes Sally walking down the alley – line game
12. Stepping out and stepping in – line game

The current Early Years Foundation Stage is difficult for a traditionally minded music teacher to actually do their job.  I have talked to quite a few music teachers and they all say the same thing – that free-flow “active learning” is incompatible with whole-class music tuition.  There are two major problems.  Firstly, the Early Years coordinators do not want children to leave their environment.  Consequently, you are not allowed to take them to the music room.  This really limits what you can do practically and I can’t see logically why we are limiting the children to one place.  We should be taking children to new places like the library, the swimming pool, the art room and the music room from a very young age – I cannot see why this is wrong.  If we can take them to the adventure playground we can take them to the music room.  The second problem is that the Early Years staff are not happy with whole-class teaching and want you to do small group activities for only those children who want to go to music.  What this actually means is that children come and go as they please and do not really engage with what you are doing.  It is incredibly difficult to play a parachute game or teach an action song when at any time the children can be distracted by Johnny in the sandpit.  

The argument given is the children are too young for organised music activities.  That is complete rubbish.  Music Together and Kindermusik are companies that have organised musical activities for toddlers and young children for many, many years and there are MT and KM practitioners who work in schools.  And in my experience, as long as you have a variety of activities, there is no reason for children to not join in with class music activities.  Thirty minutes max with action songs, parachute games, bean bag games, scarf games, instrument time and perhaps a musical story.  But to do this you need space and a distraction-free environment.  And that is out of the question.

So what do music teachers do in reality?  Some go along with it and just accept they cannot teach the children effectively.  One teacher I know just takes the whole group of kids round the corner when nobody’s looking and then does a proper music class.  Another had a big argument with Early Years and won and now can teach the children in the music room but it wasn’t without a fight.  My plan is to get out of Early Years because it is pointless trying to teach children when there are so many pressures to actually stop you teaching.

It’s such a shame as it is a wasted opportunity.  But as I have found out over the last fourteen years, teaching ideas are endlessly recycled and I am sure we will go back to whole-class structured activities in a few years.  Government ministers are talking about changing it and I think they will in a few years time.  In fact, the main reason they haven’t is political – ministers were worried that they would completely lose goodwill with Early Years teachers because of the local authority cuts to Sure Start.  Subsequently they decided it was not worth picking a fight with nursery teachers.  But I am pretty sure we will see some pressure to return to more structured activities – Liz Truss was talking about the French nursery system a few years back and how structured activities work well there.  Whatever they do decide to do, change it is definitely on the governments radar.  And for me, hopefully my five years of “Twinkle, Twinkle” and “The Wheels on the Bus” are over.  Even parents don’t get five whole years of this.  They get “Let it Go” instead… 

I am in two minds about these brightly coloured plastic tubes.  Yes they can teach pitch.  Yes they are simple to play.  Yes they are the same colours as the hand bells.  Yes you can get additional chromatic notes and octavators to obtain pitches an octave lower.  Yes kids love whacking them.  So what are my reservations?  Well simply, they sound crap.  And to make a reasonable noise you need to whack them on something hard.  And they always result in some behavioural issues.  And some pupils just can’t cope with instructional activities with them, they just want to bash them as hard as they can.  They are sturdy but not indestructible and they can bend if truly whacked.  Would I buy them if I was resourcing a music room from scratch?  Probably not, but I have used them in class, mainly because they demonstrate how longer tubes have a lower sound than shorter tubes.  You can’t show this on handbells, keyboards or pianos, you can on xylophones but Boomwhackers are good to show this important concept.  I have also used them to keep a steady beat and for simple ostinato work.  I think if they actually sounded good I might use them more often.

So Boomwhackers or an additional xylophone?  Get the xylophone.

Absolute pitch, or perfect pitch is the innate ability to identify or reproduce any pitch without a reference note.  It is really rare for anyone to have his ability in the West but it is relatively common in the East.

It’s always been a bit of an enigma because there have been many theories why some people possess the ability and some do not.  The first theory says that no one has it when they are born but through experiencing music from their environments they can gain the ability.  This is the environmental theory.  The second, is that absolute pitch is passed on genetically from families that have the gene.  This unsurprisingly is called the genetic theory.  The third theory is that we all have it innately but only some people display it later on.  This is called the innate theory.

There is evidence for all three.  It is interesting that some children learning music from a young age have absolute pitch and this has been attributed to music tuition.  However, we do not know if this is the reason, for correlation does not equal causation.  An “absolute pitch” gene has been discovered but again we are dealing with correlations.  The theory that seems most plausible is the third because scientists have found that if you disable certain parts of the brain through TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation), people who have never had absolute pitch suddenly display it.  This would suggest that everyone has the ability but during early childhood the brain produces new neural pathways to process auditory information so most people do not display absolute pitch.  The reason for this is the brain is interested in language development and absolute pitch is too much information entering the brain.  This may seem a bit strange but the brain does limit the amount of information as it can be disadvantageous.  In fact there is a plausible theory to suggest that all autism is, is too much information entering the brain at too young an age.  This would also explain why there is a link between individuals on the autistic spectrum and those with absolute pitch.  It also explains why people from the East are more likely to have the ability; tonal languages are spoken more widely in the East and the brain might interpret absolute pitches as language information so use the neural pathway responsible for absolute pitch.

So next time someone displays the wonderful aural abilities of absolute pitch, don’t feel jealous.  You too have the same abilities but to get them you either need a very precise blow to the head or have to put special magnets on your head!

Xylophones are expensive but really good for the classroom.  They may not have lots of buttons and sounds like keyboards but they have a much better physical response and quite frankly look better.  I really think if you want keyboards you should have a keyboard lab – keyboards and other classroom instruments simply do not mix well in my opinion.  The biggest problem, apart from the cost is how to set them all up.  The first thing to consider is how best to divide up the small amount of resources most schools do have.  It therefore makes sense to have two pupils to an instrument.  The only problem with this is it restricts the amount of notes you can use.  However, there are two sets of C to A notes and there are many melodies that only use only six notes, so there are umpteen activities that can be played.  A good place to find six note tunes are books for handbells.  Orff books also have many activities to cater for a limited range of notes.

In an ideal world we would have classes of 20 and have four soprano xylophones, four alto xylophones and two bass xylophones.  This would mean everybody could play together. This would cost around two thousand five hundred pounds to buy new – a lot of money for only ten instruments.  However with thought and organisation, this is actually enough to cover most primary music melody work.  It might also help to have two metalophones and some small soprano glockenspiels so the music doesn’t sound so wooden all the time.

Sometimes the screws come off the instruments.  These can be fixed using new screws and the plastic covering I found in the chemistry department – one of the science technicians was able to fix it up for me and the DT department put the screws in.  I managed to fix four instruments this way.

Beaters are important and sadly people make the mistake I did and bought the plastic yellow beaters.  These are a false economy.  For a start they bend badly, secondly they sound terrible and third they look so awful and cheap.  It is much better to buy beaters with proper felts or woven material on the ends.  It is also advantageous to set up your room so that the pitched percussion are on stands and instantly available to play.  See the picture below for details of how my friend sets up his room – his set up is really good.  He has one bass xylophone, one bass metalophone, two alto xylophones, one alto metalophone, two soprano xylophones, one soprano metalophone and four soprano glockenspiels.  This would mean twenty students could all play tuned percussion together. I find that in many schools there are instruments available but the set up is really badly organised and many instruments need to be repaired. I wish I had the stands my friend has and a little more physical space so I could have a set up like this.  Perhaps in my next school I will!

The last thing to consider is how the students will play the music.  You could go for music stands or if you want to keep it simple, learn everything by rote.  I find having the whiteboard in the line of vision the most useful as this means you don’t need to bother with photocopying and music stands but can still have something for the children to refer to in the lesson if they need it.  Also it is important to have the piano facing the children if you are going to direct from the piano or sit facing the children if you are going to accompany them on guitar.  For many schools, this is an expensive multi-year ongoing project but if you think strategically, perhaps you could have a paid after school club to pay for resources or do some fund raising.  It is money well spent, as long as the instruments are used well. 

Today the government have announced that times-tables are going to be assessed at the age of eleven through a national test.  Presumably this is a continuation of the “secondary ready” policy to ensure that all children have basic skills so they can access the secondary curriculum.  A bit like the phonics check, it is a screening process to make sure that schools are responsible for teaching times-tables.  Every school I have been to has taught multiplication tables, so there is some understandable annoyance from teachers and educationalists that the government have announced this, as it looks like they are implementing it because it is not being taught.  I doubt this is true, the reason they are testing it is to make sure that all tables up to twelve are thoroughly learned and make teachers responsible for children’s performance in the test.  As we know, just because you teach something doesn’t mean that the children have actually learned it.

Do we really need another test?  I would actually argue “yes”.  As all schools I know of are already teaching multiplication tables, no one can complain that there is any change so there should be no extra work for teachers.  As it is going to be externally marked, there is no added assessment for teachers.  It is simple and easy to understand.  If children get stressed out about it, that says a lot about the teacher making too big a deal of the testing process.  I had spelling and multiplication tests continually at school, it was just something to expect and nothing abnormal, unexpected or oppressive.  You even got a chocolate pick and mix if you got 10/10.  So why is the government calling for this national test?  My guess is they are concerned about a dangerous fallacy going around education circles that times-tables are not important and do not need to be explicitly taught.  The test will ensure tables are taught because as we all know well, what gets formally assessed gets taught.

Before we dismiss this line of thinking out of hand, we should ask if there are any good reasons why we shouldn’t teach times-tables.  The main criticism is that learning them by rote is poor pedagogy as children aren’t actually thinking about the number relationships and relying on memory; the old knowledge vs understanding argument.  There are educationalists such as Jo Boaler who argue that thinking about numbers is a much better way of understanding multiplication, especially through talking through different methods that children use to obtain an answer.  I have sympathy for this and it is always good to listen to others to think how we go about solving a problem and it is also good to confront any misconceptions at their source.  However, there is a very good argument for instant memory recall as most mathematical problems have multiple steps and if you do not know your tables by heart you are adding an extra step in your thinking process.  And as we know, the more steps you have, the more likely you are to make a mistake as it introduces an additional cognitive load.  Another argument is the ever-present one that now we have calculators why should we bother to learn multiplication facts by rote.  Isn’t this another relic from our outdated Victorian education system?  Again, cognitive load theory is a reason why instant recall is preferable to calculators but also many mathematical processes rely on multiplication relationships and concepts such as simple algebra, ratio, fractions and statistics simply do not make much sense if you do not already know your tables.  Finally, the best reason to teach them in my opinion is a bit simpler – secondary maths teachers really want the children they inherit to know them as it makes their life easier.  It’s hardly a good pedagogical reason but if we really believe in reducing teacher workload then we should take it seriously.  If secondary maths teachers have the knowledge that the children know their tables, it is one less thing that they have to worry about and those that don’t can be identified and helped right at the start of secondary school.  Maths teachers should not have to worry that their pupils do not know their tables just like English teachers should not have to worry that pupils will be unable to construct a grammatically correct sentence by the age of 11.

How does this relate to music?  I see a similar problem with learning notation and I have been guilty of making similar mistakes in the past.  When teaching piano you can learn to play through recognising the notes in relation to each other, for example when notes go in step or if they skip.  Some children work this out by numbers on their fingers which is why beginners playing all pieces with thumbs on C can result in some bad practices.  They don’t actually know their notes but have come up with their own system to relate the symbol to the sound such as thumb = C, pointy finger = D etc.  Sadly, this can actually cause problems later on when the music becomes harder or if their fingers change hand position.  One pupil I taught could play a variety of different pieces as long as thumbs were on C but did not know which note was which.  When I finally twigged that they did not really know their notes we had to more or less go back to basics and relearn material.  Sadly that child did not continue playing as a result of the frustration they encountered.  This is why I always do ten minutes of a piano lesson on basic theory using flashcards.  This has made a big difference and I encourage children to know the notes by rote rather than try to work them out.  When playing piano you have to have good hand eye coordination and, like with times-tables, we need instant recall if we are to play music fluently and to a consistent speed.  If you can instantly recall the names of all the notes on treble and bass staves then you have a much better chance of playing fluently and will find sight-reading less of a challenge.  Just like in maths you need to know your tables to be numerate, in music you need to know your notes to be musically literate.

Some music teachers will complain and say that they do teach these things, but the evidence is against us in general.  Sadly there is a large proportion of children who cannot even read treble clef by the age of 11.  This makes secondary music teachers lives much more difficult than it should.  There should be an expectation that children know their notes by the age of 11 and the government have responded to this by adding to the new KS 2 Music curriculum the expectation that staff notation will be taught.  There are music teachers, both in primary and in secondary schools who say musical literacy is not important.  We had conversations about this on my PGCE.  However, this is one of the reasons for the disastrous report into music education that I have referred to previously.  Most secondary teachers do not expect primary children to know notation but I think that they should.  You can still teach an exciting practical curriculum in primary and expect children to be musically literate just like we do the same for normal literacy.

So what practical steps can we take?  Teach notation from KS1 and practice it through practical activities for 6 years.  Teach recorders.  Teach hand bells.  Teach violins.  Teach ukuleles.  But do not expect theory will magically happen.  Theory is vitally important and it needs to be explicitly taught.  Just like all artists should know their colours, all dancers should know their steps, all mathematicians should know their tables, all musicians should know their notes.

A question asked by many parents to music teachers is when Little Johnny should start learning a musical instrument.  And the answer most music teachers give is, “when Johnny is ready”.  I try not to say this as I don’t think it is very helpful.  My reply is invariably, “well Little Wolfgang started learning Suzuki violin at age 3.  Would you like to know what that involves?” I tell the truth about some other pupils: “Little Hannah started learning piano with Mrs. Crackwhip; Hannah is pretty amazing, would you like to know how she got so good?”  Sometimes I reply with a question like, “What would you say to Little Johnny if he asks to give up after three weeks?”  When parents understand what learning an instrument really involves and how it affects their children and themselves, they start to ask the right questions, rather than looking for assurances on how good a parent they are or trying to keep up with the Jones’. 

I make it clear that when I teach an instrument my style is not the same as Mrs. Crackwhip’s.  Not because Mrs. Crackwhip is bad but because parents need to know that tuition is different, not only for each individual student but because teachers are different too.  I explain that my pupils will not go on to be virtuosos like hers and they will not get over 140/150 in their ABRSM examinations, but there is role for my style of teaching too.  It’s a bit slower paced, a little more theory based and more appropriate for children who want to learn but are going to really struggle with Mrs. Crackwhip’s approach.  But I will defend Mrs. Crackwhip to the bitter end because her style of teaching is absolutely vital for a certain kind of pupil that needs to be constantly stretched and will not be concerned about two to three hours of daily practice.  We need a variety of different teachers to cater for the variety of different students.

Another question people ask is what instrument to learn and when this should be taught.  I normally say that clarinet and trumpet teachers have told me that it is best to wait for pupils to have their front two adult teeth before learning these instruments.  I have no idea if that is true but it is what I have been told.  They often ask about guitar – I try to discourage this as it is very difficult for young children to play well.  I sometimes say to these parents to get a small ukulele first and see how they get on with that before starting the guitar.  That normally leaves parents asking about piano, violin and flute.  I try to encourage the cello and viola as well as the violin, as there is no reason why small children cannot play these as long as there are good teachers available.  I suggest that budding flautists learn the recorder first before buying a flute, which is one of the reasons I like to teach recorder in Year 2.  I try to promote drum kit too.  At my current school we have some great Year 1 and 2 drummers, one of which is already in a band playing around town with his dad in local gigs!  The one instrument I get asked about the most is the piano.  There is nothing to stop most children from learning this from the age of 3 but there are many reasons why it might not be a good idea to start so early.  However, I am very happy with very young children learning musical instruments; the research is pretty clear that the younger you learn, the more advanced you will get if you keep it up and also there is a much higher percentage of children who have absolute pitch when they started young.  I will blog about this phenomenum in my next post.

This is the half term where I focus on teaching pitch to Year 1 and Year 2.  We do pitch almost every lesson but this is the time where I teach it in detail.  All the children now know their Kodaly pitches and hand signs and have spent quite a substantial time on aural work so they are ready for something slightly different.  Year 1’s will be taking a graphic score approach to pitch called “Magic Rabbit” which will consist of playing, writing and composing their own graphic scores on mini-whiteboards individually and in pairs.  The Year 2’s will be learning to read music using 6 notes from middle C to A.  For those children who find this easy I have designed a harder book with an octave of notes.  This short course also involves music from China so we will be learning about Chinese New Year and making some music using pentatonic scales.  The name of this course is “Dragon Pitch”.

Magic Rabbit is a story I have made up about a rabbit who lives at the top of the hill and likes to play.  He likes walking up and down, skipping up and down and sliding up and down.  How does he slide up the hill?  Well he is called Magic Rabbit! Magic Rabbit is shown to slide using a diagonal line, walking using steps and skipping by little arrows.  They start easy and then get quite complicated.  The children play glockenspiels and xylophones to show how he moves and later on they write down how he moves and finally they make their own compositions that their partner has to play.  The basic misconception many children make is to misunderstand the passage of time graphically along the x axis.  So many children just do not get this and every lesson I talk about this misconception as the whole basis of notated music rests on this principle – you have to read horizontally and vertically simultaneously to read music properly.  We also sing songs about rabbits to go along with the theme like “Little Rabbit Foo Foo” and “In a Cottage in a Wood”.  At the end of the unit I assess them on how well they play and compose their Magic Rabbit pieces.  We have the formative assessment of some pieces to play before they can leave so I can check their understanding.  Magic Rabbit always works well but it only gives a simple understanding of pitch, basic high and low and the direction the music is played.  This is appropriate for 5 and 6 year old children.

Dragon Pitch starts with simple music in four bar phrases where music starts with only one note and then goes up to six.  Although there are no such things as learning styles I actually teach the notes kinaesthetically as it is good fun and they get to understand pitch in terms of up and down.  Middle C is your toes, D is your knees, E is your waist, F is your shoulders, G is your head and A is hands above your head.  We learn many tunes this way before we play them on xylophones and glockenspiels.  Later on we take away the F’s and B’s and play some pentatonic tunes to fit into the theme of Chinese Music.  The major themes of this unit are reading and playing from standard Western notation and improvisatory work using pentatonic scales.  I want to put some more Orff work into this this year so I may make some changes.  We sing a song I made up “It’s Chinese New Year”, “A dragons very fierce” and “Puff the Magic Dragon”.  It is difficult to assess improvisation so I just ask the children to play some of the simple notated pieces and assess these.  These tunes are also used for formative assessment using the exit ticket approach.  Dragon Pitch works well but is quickly and easily forgotten.  In units of work to come I will be revisiting Dragon Pitch as it pointless teaching it if the children will rapidly forget it.  The most controversial element is explicitally teaching staff notation to young children.  I have been criticised for it in the past but I just think being musically literate is something important for every child to grasp and makes life a lot easier for other teachers as they progress.

During this time I will not be forgetting rhythm, we will do our rhythms every lesson just like aural work and instrument of the week.  The instruments of the week for Year 1 are Thai instruments as we are located in Thailand.  We will learn about the ranat, khim, klui, ching and khong wong.  The Year 2’s will be learning about some Chinese instruments such as the gesheng, erhu, pippa and dizi.

I have a wish-list that I send to my boss from time to time.  So far I have got a mini drum kit, hand bells and 4 new lollipop drums. This year I would like an electric piano for the hall, some more cymbals and a bass xylophone.

But more than anything I want to just be allowed to teach the children in the way I teach best, in the music room with all the instruments I already have. 

I am way more likely to receive the instruments in the top paragraph than receive the autonomy in the second sadly.

I have been reading quite a bit about assessing music in the classroom, particularly composition.  A good place to read more is Martin Fautley’s blog.  Basically, even after over twenty-five years of composition being an integral part of the curriculum there are some widespread weaknesses that are incredibly worrying.  The first is that A-Level music teachers have little to no confidence in the marking of A-Level compositions.  I can relate to this, in my teacher training we were given some compositions to mark by our tutor who we later found out was the Chief Examiner for Edexcel.  None of us on the course agreed on what mark to give the composition and we all disagreed on the work put in, whether it was plagiarised and what creative processes were involved.  It seems like little has changed over the years.

Fautley and other music educators have said that the answer to many of these problems with assessment is to assess composing rather than composition.  This means putting an emphasis on the process rather than the product and is in keeping with the relatively recent focus on formative assessment in schools.  They say the value is in the skills learned through composing – making mistakes, articulating ideas, refining ideas, improving work through feedback etc.  The biggest problem with this is that most schools have whole-school summative assessment policies and this will not fit with them.  However,  as many schools are now changing their assessment policies as a result of the government abolishing National Curriculum levels it is a good time to bring forward these ideas on music assessment.

Although I agree with these educators on the value of formative assessment, I am unconvinced this is in preference to summative assessment of composition.  There should still be a final product like there is for all coursework and examinations.  This will come as no surprise but I do think we had it right in the past.  In our harmony exams we had pastiche exercises of Bach chorales, string quartets and in years preceding mine they used to do fugue.  This can be marked because you can see how accurately your work compares to the original.  It is also educationally strong because it improves your harmony skills, something absolutely vital in my professional work as a composer.  Examining boards still do assess harmony skills but I would get rid of any sense of personal originality and just go with more forms of pastiche.  It should be communicated that the composition element of the course is deliberately asking for the candidate to copy a musical style.  And when asked to say why personal composition is out of favour, to reply honestly that there were too many issues with marking individual compositions and there was too much variance in the results.  A-Level musicians would understand that – why risk a good grade because marking is so erratic?  Many people will cringe at this analysis and the downside is that we would not be formally assessing some really good composition work coming from young adults.  It does seem to be defeatist but it is a way with actually dealing with the problem and if it has not gone away in the last twenty-five years, why should it now?

Edit 05/02/16 – I have just found out from another music teacher that pastiche is really what the examiners are looking for.  He went on an Edexcel course that explicitly told him that A-Level examiners were looking for compositions that emulated a style.  Note that this was just for one exam board, it might not be necessarily true for them all.  We need to have some very serious discussions with examiners if this is true.

 

Understanding music at a higher level involves a sense of chronology of how music has developed over time.  This used to be taught explicitly but now has been replaced with topics being inserted throughout with no sense of the overarching scheme of how it all fits together.  I will try to now explain why this is problematic.

The subject that has been most dissected in the past has been History.  My chronological knowledge of History is so poor because I have no idea how it all fits together.  I know certain epochs are from ancient history and some old and some more recent but really that is it.  The only dates I learned were 1066 and 1914-1918 and I know I am not alone in my ignorance.

A number of years ago I did a course on how the Bible fits together from Creation to New Creation and it was a complete revelation if you pardon the pun!  Stories I knew and thought I understood actually made some sense when put in an overarching narrative of how the God of the Israelites worked through history to the present day through a system of promises, signs and covenants.  It actually made some sort of logical sense for the first time, even though I had been a regular church-goer for many years.

In music, most people do not know the different periods of musical history and in a drive to become more “relevant”, now study  predominantly 20th and 21st Century curriculum.  If you think that I am being unfair here, read the 2013 Ofsted Report into music education Music Hubs – What Schools Must Do.  Here is a quote from the really damning report:

Classical music, as a serious component of the curriculum, was treated as a step too far in most of the primary and secondary schools surveyed, at least until Key Stage 4. It was felt by teachers and leaders to be too difficult or inaccessible for pupils. This reluctance created an unnecessary gap in pupils’ musical and cultural education.

So when should we start to show that music has developed through time?  I would argue the time to start this is in Key Stage 2.  In Key Stage 1 the priority must be rhythm and pitch, texture, timbre, tempo, structure and dynamics to understand how music is made before moving on to when it was made.  I think the chronology should be referred to explicitly throughout Key Stage 2 but I would put a specific mini course at the end of Year 6 to show how it all fits together.  All children should be able to know by the age of 11 that there is a tradition of Western notated music from the Medieval Period to the present day.  They should know about the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic and a little about the 20th and 21st Centuries.  I would probably leave much of the 20th Century to Key Stage 3 as you cannot make any sense of the variety of music in these periods without a solid understanding of reactions to Romantic music, particularly the composer Wagner.  

The worry most teachers have is that this could be incredibly dry and uninspiring.  It does not have to be that way whatsoever but does need a shift away from entertainment to actual learning.  If we are to help our secondary colleagues we need to prepare the children they inherit for a curriculum that will require a more robust theoretical and academic approach.  That is if we are to take the Ofsted music report seriously and actually engage with its recommendations.

We just did a choir concert today and sang 11 songs with KS 1.  Many of the songs had solos and all of them had instruments.  The songs were:

1) Jingle Bells with sleigh bells
2) White Christmas with solo introduction and triangles
3) Silent Night with solos and triangles
4) Deck the Halls with drums
5) Santa Claus is coming to town with a solo introduction
6) Feliz Navidad with maracas
7) O Christmas Tree with Chinese cymbals
8) Rudolph with lots of instruments and the beginning solo
9) Little Donkey with woodblocks and hand bells
10) Let it snow with introductory solo
11) We with you a merry Christmas with cymbals

One of the best instruments primary school children can learn is the recorder.  It fits nice and easy into your book bag, sheet music fits in nicely too and you can make it is as simple or complicated as you like.  The problem is that it still has a bad reputation as a basic and unsophisticated instrument.  I always enjoyed playing mine but in secondary school it was not considered a proper instrument until we had an exchange student from Germany.  In our school orchestra we were told we were going to play a recorder concerto and we all laughed at the idea but learned the music as we were told to, thinking that our teacher was joking as it clearly said “violin” concerto on the top of the page.  Then at the rehearsal, we saw our exchange student take out a small case and play an incredible Vivaldi violin concerto on a little wooden descant recorder.  I never considered the recorder a joke instrument after that.

The basic problem with recorders is that you really do have to completely cover the holes to make a nice sound and you can’t blow loudly.  This is why it can be useful to learn the four-holed ocarina prior to the recorder.  If you blow loud you get no sound so you learn quite quickly that you have to blow quietly.  The other difficulty is that notation gets in the way and you end up with either some getting bored at the pace of lessons because other struggle to read notation or the converse, using letters prevents any real knowledge and skill of rhythm.  I have found the way to start is to use coloured squares and rectangles.  Note B is blue, A is red and G is green.  The rhythm is notated by the size of the rectangles with a square being 1 count.  This way we can play a lot of music quickly yet reading the graphic notation carefully to understand rhythm.  After about six lessons we basically go back to the beginning and read everything using standard Western staff notation.  This way they can concentrate on the notation having already internalised the melodies.  

I normally start recorders at the end of Year 2 so they have the whole summer holiday to practice music that we have learned.  I have made my own recorder tutor but I also recommend the standard “Recorder from the Beginning” by John Pitts.  This fits nicely into book bags and goes at a pretty good pace.  I do introduce some other resources as well as the one thing that most recorder tutors do not do is give enough pieces to practice.

Basically, at the end of Year 2 I get students to learn B, A, G and E.  Some teachers like to put in C and D and miss out E but this is a technical mistake as learning E does give you a much better hold of the instrument and also is a good introduction to the clarinet that some pupils go on to play later on.  In Year 3 we master all the notes of the D major scale.  I expect all the students to be able to play everything and I do not differentiate for the majority of the class, I expect all of them to read and play to a relatively high standard.  The only exceptions I make are for those students that have joined later on in the year.  I normally give them a book to take home and a few one on one lessons in lunch time to get them to around the standard of the other children. 

I would recommend all primary students learn the recorder.  In fact, I would make it compulsory to do at least Grade 1 before they leave Year 6 if I was allowed to!  This would mean that our secondary colleagues would inherit all children capable of playing an instrument and knowing the basics of musical notation.