Respond with understanding to a range of elements through movement, verbalisation, or musical participation
Continue to use real life opportunities to use musical language, e.g. ‘This is great, marching together to the steady beat. Oh my goodness, the tempo is increasing, it’s getting faster!’
Do not shy away from using musical vocabulary with early years children. It is perfectly appropriate to talk about fast and slow, high and low, loud and quiet, and use words to describe timbre and texture. Children will respond to these terms and they will begin to use this vocabulary themselves, and if they don’t at this stage, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t absorbing the vocabulary and learning.
Encourage children to join in with a pulse/beat when listening to music, using body percussion or untuned percussion/other sound makers.
Select musical examples that demonstrate a really clear strong pulse/beat and model playing along (or clapping, tapping, marching etc.).
Give them a variety of time signatures – the more types of metre they encounter, the more developed their aural memory becomes. Young children find compound time appealing and good to move to. It is not something ‘difficult’ to do when they are older.
Encourage children to clap some very simple rhythms from songs whilst saying the accompanying words out loud.
Chants, particularly echo chants, provide useful rhythmic examples for children to copy both verbally and with clapping/tapping actions, e.g. ‘Chop, Chop, Choppity Chop’.
Children may be able to clap or tap the rhythm of their names or other familiar words, e.g. fish and chips.
This rhythm work can support early aural discrimination work of pre-phonics.
Encourage children to join in with well known songs on untuned percussion instruments or sound makers. Children may be able to tap the rhythm of the words of a well known song whilst singing, or join in with the pulse/beat.
Children may be able to play the rhythm of a favourite song or rhyme on a percussion instrument or sound maker whilst keeping the words in their ‘thinking voice’.
Choose songs and chants with repeated lines or words, e.g. ‘A Sailor Went to Sea, Sea, Sea’ or ‘London Bridge’, so that syllabic rhythm patterns are more easily embedded.
Explore tempo by playing your instrument and inviting children to move.
Observe the natural speed of their movements and offer this rather than imposing a tempo upon them; young children move a lot faster than adults when they walk, for example.
Explore tempo through games such as ‘Listen, Listen, Here I Come’. Children sit in a circle and perform the rhyme:
Listen, listen, here I come,
Someone special gets the drum.
Encourage children to identify different sounds made by instruments/sound makers when the instrument/sound maker is out of sight. Can they identify whether they heard a bell or a drum, or find a duplicate of the instrument from a selection you have laid out? Can they explore the effect of combining different instruments together?
Ask school staff what songs they regularly sing in class and perform these on your instrument to expose children to different timbres or textures.
If possible, have tuned percussion instruments available, so that children can explore pitch independently. Model playing glissandi, encouraging children to move their hands up and down as the pitch changes.
Always offer two beaters for playing tuned percussion and model playing with a beater in each hand. This will encourage children to adopt good playing practice.
Use simple songs and action rhymes – either spoken or with a limited toneset (number of pitches) – to explore musical elements. For example, ‘Slowly, slowly, very slowly’ to support tempo:
Slowly, slowly, very slowly
Creeps the garden snail,
Slowly, slowly, very slowly,
Up the wooden rail.
Quickly, quickly, very quickly,
Runs the little mouse,
Quickly, quickly, very quickly,
Right inside his house!
These rhymes are about storytelling, so remember to add drama. A pause before the quick mouse is very exciting!
Provide ample opportunities and adequate space for listening to music and responding to the musical elements through movement. Ensure that the music listened to reflects a wide range of styles and cultures. For example, Tchaikovsky’s ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ could be used for exploring dynamics. ‘Seven Jumps’ (a Danish dance) could be used for exploring pitch and duration.
Children may show an increasing awareness of elements such as dynamics and tempo through their movement. For example, they may march to the beat, or move their hands high and low to match contrasting pitches. They may tiptoe or curl up when the dynamic is quieter, and stretch and stomp when louder music is played.
Where possible, provide large, open spaces for children to respond physically to music.
Explore the progression of this Learning Descriptor
