'Our Street Our Song' Early Years Project - Sheffield - Music Mark Making

Polly Ives is one of 4 musicians working on a 2 year project with Early Years in SE Sheffield.   Here, she describes one of her sessions at Phillimore Primary:

At the start of the session, Polly showed the children some sheet music and discussed the notes’ patterns and shapes and that it’s a special kind of writing or mark-making or a musical language. 

Polly then played an improvisation based on some music by Vivaldi with an Indian shruti box drone underneath. She interspersed some happy/ sad/ angry/ sleepy melodies inspired by the Vivaldi and they discussed musical moods. 

They sang ‘If you’re happy and you’re know it, clap your hands (angry/ stamp your feet, sad/ have a cry, sleepy/ have a sleep)’. 

Polly then gave the children a sheet of music and encouraged them to draw their own ‘music’ - their own patterns/ copy the shapes of the phrases/ experiment with different coloured pens for happy/sad/ angry/ sleepy. 

Polly encouraged the EY practitioners to sit and draw with the children and to vocalise to help them create their shapes and sounds. The most successful vocal sounds for mark-making include drawing spots, straight lines, squirls, zig zags - a bit like morse code! She encouraged them to not use words as language is a barrier for a lot of the children - they were just playing around with sounds and shapes and colours = their own music!

Later, they all came back together and Polly performed the children’s unique pieces.