Delivering Creative Music-Making for EYFS - a tutor's story!
I have been a music tutor on the ‘Leaps and Bounds’ project since September 2018 and absolutely love it! When delivering a creative music session to an early years class the best part is how the children react to you and feed off your energy. The children respond instantly to me when I sing or play my violin, with an excited facial expression, a laugh, a smile, or they may dance or join in with the singing. You also get continuous feedback from the children and as a teacher you can respond immediately, for example a child might say ‘ I want to move like this!’ and I the teacher might say ‘That’s a good idea, can we all do that?’ and then improvise on my violin to their movements. This not only develops the child’s confidence, but it also encourages the other children to try new ways of moving, thus developing their social skills, their movement vocabulary and their sense of musical pulse, as I play my violin in time with their movements.
When schools closed in March 2020, our ‘Leaps and Bounds’ team had to find a new way of delivering our creative music sessions. We like many other music projects around the country had to adapt to the changing situation by moving lessons online. We had to consider how to obtain the same impact that our face to face sessions have, but in a video format. #EdsentialAtHome was born, Edsential staff began creating PDFs with lots of ideas that children could do and explore at home, these ideas covered art, music, P.E. and encouraged many cross curricular links, these PDFs were used in schools for the children of Key Workers and by parents and children across the county. Our ‘Leaps and Bounds’ team then began developing fortnightly PDFs that anyone could access and use, with additional resources for our project schools, based on the same themes used by #EdsentialAtHome, and #LeapsAndBoundsAtHome was created.
After the Easter break we then decided to take it up a gear and start creating video’s linked to PDF’s that could then be sent out to schools taking part in the ‘Leaps and Bounds’ project. We continued linking these lessons to the same themes as #EdsentialAtHome but adapted them to suit EYFS children. When we began creating our videos we suddenly became aware of how we had to make our EYFS children feel that we were talking and smiling at them. We had to make sure we were looking directly at the camera and engaging with them like we would do if we were in the room. We had to think how the child at the other end of the screen might respond, we wanted them to be talking to the video and giving their ideas too, or answering the questions that we would ask.
Obviously we couldn’t respond to their ideas, but we could encourage them to try their ideas out after watching. The videos we created were not supposed to be instructional videos, they were supposed to ignite the child’s imagination and encourage them to explore their own ideas and be creative. We had to find new ways to be creative through making our videos, thinking about creating colourful backgrounds, finding locations around our houses to record the videos. My own children, who were also at home at the time, often helped with the videos by showing the Makaton signs or by performing the actions in the videos with me.
Then every now and then we’d have some feedback through an email or on Twitter, and then we knew that it was definitely all worth it! It was just lovely to see the response to a video we had made below!
