Introducing Learning Trees - Soundpots Telford

Telford Soundpots

How best to keep practitioners, managers, parents and children informed about the progress of a music project in their setting?  For Soundpots Telford (our speech and language project for under fives funded by Youth Music and run by Telford & Wrekin Music Service and Make Some Noise) we introduced a ‘learning tree’, which was displayed in each of our eight settings throughout the project. This learning tree could take any form. Created by the setting, it was a two- or three-dimensional creation of a leafless tree with all our areas of development attached to different branches, eg ‘Tuning into children’,’ ‘Big drum’, ‘Sharing at home and in the setting’ etc.  

At the end of each session we stuck leaves to the development area branches so that over the weeks the tree grew greener. We could see at a glance which areas I was delivering most in, and which were lacking. There was no pressure for each area to perform equally, as in some settings different areas worked better than others, and some activities were, simply, more effective and popular (‘instruments’ and ‘singing’ grew their leaves the quickest!).  The learning tree provided an additional form of monitoring that was engaging, informal and ‘unacademic’ and which meant Soundpots had a constant physical presence in the rooms.  I was delighted when one nursery (Grange Park) made a film of their Soundpots experience:  there, right at the start of the film, was the learning tree.  Fabulous!

Projects like Soundpots are so much about collaborative working and having all stakeholders on board and involved. It is easy to forget that the children – in our case, under fives - are also stakeholders. The learning tree was a way of engaging them in monitoring. In several nurseries, the children became involved in making the leaves and sticking them on. We spent time cutting and colouring and sharing reflections. This was an excellent opportunity for me to learn about the project’s personal impact on the children – and their comments were written down in our Soundpots Journal, another simple monitoring and learning tool we had.  Little chats about the tree - ‘How many leaves are we sticking on the ‘Big drum’ branch today?’, ‘How big should we make the leaves?’ etc - deepened their Soundpots experience.