Blown Instruments by Trish Keelan/Power (Triangle Project Music Leader)

Why do young children seem to love playing blown instruments?

Why do young children seem to love playing blown instruments?  Why is access to them denied more often than not?

I have been working in Children’s Centres, Nursery Schools and Schools for 15 years or so.  Like many Musicians and Early Years Educators, I cart around bags and trolleys of musical instruments, tuned and untuned.  The usual assortment: shakers, claves, and xylo-bars.  Lurking at the bottom of my bag are usually a few tin whistles.  The children always seem to find the tin whistles during the free play session, no matter how well they are hidden!  I do get them out but I tend to demonstrate them in a controlled manner and not in a free play situation.

Why?

Well, children like to blow whistles as hard as possible and for as long as possible.  They try and manage to find such high pitched sounds I didn’t know it was possible to achieve!

Squabbles also seem to break out as the whistles are passed around, from mouth to mouth, generally mixing up the germ pool! Another issue.  Schools and Children’s Centres seem to have different policies concerning whether instruments played orally should be wiped after each child’s use.

It is the overall mayhem and ear-splitting noise that puts off a lot of Early Years Education establishments from using blown instruments, unless they are used in a strictly controlled manner.  I have seen this over and over again all over the country.

It does not have to be like that.

A few years ago I was given a small grant to conduct a research project about this very subject.  I wanted children to be able to access blown instruments in a free play manner, and I conducted a project over four days in two different settings. 

I carefully sourced a blown instrument, a plastic saxophone, that had a mellow sound that could be played relentlessly without the ear-splitting noise that so often causes irritation if not madness.  The instruments are made by Bontempi – very inexpensive.  I bought 20 of them.  One for every child. 

The children loved them.  They explored them thoroughly.  They formed groups and played to each other. They swayed and moved to the sounds they were making.  Some children worked out that they could pick out sections of well known nursery rhymes on the instruments and sought guidance from adults to help them with this.

They were a great success.