'I Could Do That' - Know About and Use Early Years Apps

During Summer 2014 we held ‘Early Years Arts in the Park – I Could Do That’; a free active creative learning event held in Rufford Abbey Country Park by soundLINCS and the Nottinghamshire County Council Arts Service.

Over 300 practitioners, parents and children joined us for a day of innovative ‘active learning’ music and arts workshops, with 10 different activities running throughout the day. The children were involved in all of the day’s workshops, giving the Early Years practitioners a great insight into how engaging the activities were bespokely for their groups and also experiencing the impact of the session on the children.

The event built on the simple phrase ‘I can do that’ by using the known habits of settings to create and develop a programme of events and activities that inspire and enthuse the Early Years practitioners and their groups.

It did this through bringing to life existing information leaflets and trails within Rufford Abbey Country Park and showing carers ways of working with their children and discovering how arts can deliver the Early Years Foundation Stage whilst having fun, and providing scope for them to further develop the ideas themselves.

This is the first of a series of 4 videos illustrating the active learning provided by music workshops on the day.  This video offers an overview of the workshop ‘Know About and Use Early Years Apps’ with soundLINCS’ Music Facilitator Eddy Mentzel. Eddy has worked with soundLINCS for the past 10 years, specialising in music technology.  He has worked in a diverse range of settings and with groups from early years to adult. More recently Eddy has been delivering full class iPad workshops in primary schools across the country.

In his workshop Eddy used iPads to demonstrate a variety of tried and tested music apps for early year’s activities, enabling practitioners and children to explore and create music using the iPads, and gain advice from a music technology specialist.

To find out more about the applications that Eddy uses in the video and many more apps for Early Years and other age groups, visit our App Share page here.

We’ll be uploading the remaining videos in the series showing some of the great music workshops from “Early Years Arts in the Park – I Could Do That!” Keep an eye out for ‘Play Music When I Don’t Have Any Instruments – Junk Music’, ‘Create Musical Games’ and ‘Create Sound Stories’; which will be uploaded fortnightly over the coming weeks.