Music Monday - The importance of repetition and practice.
/A few weeks ago I wrote about what I was revisiting about early learning as a result of having our 3 year old grandson living with us for a couple of months. Today I am pursuing a few more of those thoughts.
It is many years since I taught (or parented) pre-schoolers. These days I teach a mix of adolescent age groups, plus tertiary aged students and adults of all ages.
But living with a pre-schooler reminds me of some important lessons:
Kids genuinely love learning and exploring new ideas. William and I have been playing around lots with the concept of beat and rhythm – both in music and language. He loves to move to the beat. He loves to tap and bang the beat. He fits nonsense sounds to a beat. But beat doesn’t have to be confined to the times when we are consciously doing music activities. Last night his Mommy formed a family conga line as we chanted and stomped him into the shower.
Little kids are way more capable than we sometimes think of making connections. William often says, “That’s like the….”.
Of course, as a doting grandparent it is much easier to observe these moments. But as teachers we need to be switched on to moments of student connection – and we need to practise finding the right questions to stimulate the connections.
William loves the iPad (and other devices) and – like most of his generation – amazes us with his facility on a device. But he also loves to explore all of his environment – and so many everyday activities can be used to reinforce rhythmic and musical concepts. Yesterday he found our jar of coffee grounds and was curious about how we scoop out the coffee for the plunger. This started a game of scooping coffee from the jar to a bowl. I observed him muttering ‘ta-aa, ta-aa’ as he scooped – in other words making a rhythmic connection. He was having fun but subconsciously that important beat concept was being further internalised. We started to fit words and melody to the beat and a simple song emerged.
All this time spent with William has reinforced yet again my huge respect for what primary music teachers do for the children in their charge.
It is such important work!
