As adults some of us use music as our therapy. If we are lucky it is a daily occurrence, no matter if it’s playing an instrument, listening to a favourite CD or singing alone in the car (my preference!). It is intensely personal. I do not always find the music my husband plays in our house to be therapeutic…for me. Often it is music that he feels the need to hear — I am particularly averse to Christmas music here in the US since it makes me feel extremely sad and homesick for the happy (non-commercial) English Christmas’s of my childhood — thank goodness we are finally in the February!
Part of the reason that music isn’t always in my world, much as I have CD’s that I absolutely love, is firstly that my own CD player (I have yet to move to having my music on my phone or owning my own ipod!) isn’t in an accessible place to be permanently plugged in, secondly I am rarely at home by myself, but perhaps more to the point our main home CD player setup has always been too complicated for me to operate!
However, music is vital in my world of working with babies and toddlers. I regularly try to sing to one, or several, knowing each of them well enough to understand their favourite tunes. Sometimes it just involves singing a fun song or even a made up one that’s personal to the child, sometimes it’s singing along to a favourite nursery rhyme in a book. (I always tend to ‘read’ the book afterwards so that we can diversify the experience and label more of the characters in the book — adding broader vocabulary, vocal expression and actions too).
It is disheartening most days to work with one colleague who really doesn’t love music, especially music which works well with children – even pleasing classical music!
I perform music therapy experiments in our classroom almost every day. Asking myself if I have a special song which will captivate at least one child. I am grateful to one family whose little girl loved ‘Baby Beluga’ — when we finally got the book in our classroom I started singing the song as best I could — apparently I was close enough because she always sat and listened! It even became a tool, a reward, to persuade her to cooperate, and she did.
I offered one of our 15 month olds the chance to listen to my sons singing barbershop harmony — it was a quiet day, otherwise I wouldn’t have taken out my phone and pulled up youtube! However, this experiment has been remarkable because of its effect on that child and that I’ve been able to repeat the same piece of music once a day for several days and get the identical response from her: she peacefully lays against me slightly swaying, occasionally burbling along and asking me to name the four singers (which I’ve done each time we listen and watch). She now calls them ‘boys’ because I ask her if she wants to ‘hear the pretty music with the boys singing’.
Conversely, one other more agitated, dysregulated and emotionally unstable 18 month old simply said “No, No” when I played it. Barbershop harmony didn’t calm him. For him I tried a little comedy song that I sang from my childhood, and my children’s, called ‘The Bee Song’. I really just sang the refrain for him, but he loved it, it made him feel happy and he smiled and laughed a lot! I repeated that experiment for several days until he transferred to his crying state in our Toddler classroom. No one knows the song there and sad to relate I’m not sure it would fit in their ‘programme’ either, however he does seem happier than he’s been in more than 18 months!
It is even sadder to relate that no other teacher seems capable of using ‘my’ type of music therapy with our babies.
In my experience my ‘music therapy’ renders these babies calm and happy — what more could we want of music?
Contrast that with the recorded music used in our Primary classroom wherein the words and the voices are garbled (as in so many ‘made for children’ CD’s), even though the sentiments of issues like ‘recognising strangers’ are most valuable. The response last week of the oldest child (almost 5) was quite telling, to me at least: “Why do we have to listen to this every day?”
I feel that such a song would be better taught by the teacher’s voice alone in her very clear diction. The effect of learning by rote from a CD was brought to my attention after the school holiday party when that oldest (and probably brightest child) in the Primary classroom lead the group loudly singing for me ‘Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer’, ending with ‘…he’ll go down in my…ste…ry’ NOT ‘hist…o…ry’!
We need to be close to and facing our babies and young children as we teach them language through speech or singing — otherwise they simply learn the garbled version from CD’s, DVD’s and TV, and, as I discovered several years ago, language learned that way is extremely hard to correct!
Let’s all expand our musical repertoire and share those riches to create a more amenable learning environment every day.