Here are five teaching music resources in the field of early childhood music:
- Prepared curriculum resources;
- Written resources, books, academic papers, scores;
- Recordings songs and instrumental music;
- Collections: local, national and state Libraries; your personal; your organisation’s; your families’;
- Live Performers — including you.
I’m going to run through this list of teaching music resources that are available for us to garner as people who want to enrich children’s lives through music.
I’m not going to address you as music educators, because some people won’t be coming from that background, and maybe you’re one of those. So, that’s why I’m focusing on ‘Early Childhood Music’, not ‘Early Childhood Music Education’. There are many people who enrich children through arts.
1st KIND CURRICULUM RESOURCES
First, we’ve got prepared curriculum resources, and that’s my job. That’s what I sell, resources that I’ve written and recorded. Resources are usually in the form of curriculum documents, or units of work, or programs or lesson plans. We’ll deal with them in depth another time.
2nd KIND WRITTEN STUFF
Second, we’ve got books and other literature such as articles, songbooks, written scores, and that’s a class of written stuff. We can look more in depth into that kind of resource when we tackle professional development in another post.
Meanwhile, you are going to need to access a lot of song books, children’s literature, lyric charts and possibly scores and work out whether you can legally use some of them in your work with children and families. Gather what you already have and start a wish-list of children’s books and songbooks. I’ll write more about songs in the next post on resources.
3rd KIND RECORDED STUFF
Third, there’s recorded stuff. We’ve got recordings on vinyl, on CDs, and let’s not overlook vinyl at the moment. It’s very popular right now. Children will be seeing vinyl records in their homes, so if we can take a vinyl recording and a little player into our rooms, I’m sure that the directness of that experience will be fabulous for early childhood. We’ve still got CDs, even though we pretend we haven’t, we’ve got hundreds of them. It’s not so easy to find the CD players these days. We’ve got MP3s, we’ve got DVDs, we’ve got streaming services, YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, Pandora, all these platforms. We have to be careful there because we can’t just use those in our businesses. Rights violations must be taken into account. That’s why if I play any music to you in my videos, it’s going to be music that I’ve produced so that I don’t infringe anyone else’s music rights.
You are going to need to access a lot of recordings and work out whether you can legally use some of them in your work with children and families. I’ll write more about recodoings in the next post on resources.
4th KIND COLLECTIONS
Fourth, we have collections.
We’ve got local, state and national library music collections. If you want something really special, if something’s happening in your group that you need a particular recording for and it’s not easily available, you might find that your librarian will help you with access.
Then there are personal collections, including not just ours, yours and mine, but the families that we’re dealing with, they’ll have personal collections of music. And if they come from countries far away, they might’ve brought recordings with them that are not available here. So, there might be some dances and some particular environmental sounds and some children’s songs in those family recordings.
Then we have children’s broadcasts or digital media programs in many family media collections. What surprised me with my latest little grandies and great grandies growing up is that they have something playing all the time in their living room. Their parent/carer has managed their environment to make sure that they’re completely surrounded by what’s being produced for children, good, bad, and indifferent. That’s happening to them with or without our interventions. So, we best take note of the fact and bring in some of their favourites every now and then into our programs so that the children and families like us and get to know that we are like them, that we like what they like!
Next we have music apps that the children themselves may have on their open or closed to the internet, iPads and tablets and devices.
You are going to need to access your own collection as well as your local library, your workplace if you have one, the families you work with and get the grapevine working for you to find out who has that song you loved when you were a little kid but only half-remember now.
5th KIND PEOPLE
Fifth, we’ve come to the bottom of the list and this is about the resources that are people. This category is made up of yourself with your songs held in memory and your musical presentation skills; other musicians; and other music presenters and educators in our lives, or that we can connect with in various places such as forums like this or Facebook groups. These folk can be rich resources for us as they share their verbal knowledge, or post videos of their groups. Some can be very free with what they tell us, it’s just wonderful.
Then we have community musicians, amateur and professional, so we don’t always have to pay somebody to get access to their ideas or their performances.
And then there are, of course, musicians who’s job is to perform specifically for children. One of my favourites is the Australian sister duet called The Little Stevies. [“e.g. Performer/ Songwriters The Little Stevies – for children – Teeny Tiny Stevies”]
They started out performing folk/indie music to a following of peers. And then they noticed that the children in the audiences were in awe of them, of course. And then they got their own babies. Now they write for children as well as for adults, incorporating children into their performances. They now write and perform many children’s songs and have a wonderful potty training song, called ‘On the Toilet’.
There’s another one I found from the United States called the Poop Song. It’s getting them to realize that feeling, and then what the steps are, go to the toilet, deal with the underwear, sit and wait etc. So, it’s absolutely perfect for the 3-4-year-olds.
And then there are traveling performers and musicians and actors and dancers and magicians and acrobats. And they all use music in their shows. If you are someone working in a child care center, it’s easy to overlook the musical aspect of some performer that you’re bringing in. But if you take note of how the children react to the music, of course, their mood is immediately affected by any kind of music, even the scary stuff they hear when they’re sleeping.
You are going to need to access live performers to enrich your group sessions and to recommend to your families.
And so for now, this is my list of the kinds of teaching music resources that are available to you, 1) prepared curriculum resources, 2) books and other written works, 3) recordings, 4) collections and 5) performers.
Don’t forget to count yourself. There’s always a resource collection in your head. As one of you said to me the other day, ‘I’ve got songs in my head that I learned as a child.’
Collections: e.g., from Carol’s Collection
Children’s Song BOOKS
- Gustafson, Scott (illustrator) 2007. Favourite Nursery Rhymes from Mother Goose Greenwich Workshop Press: Seymour.
- Opie, Iona (editor) and Wells, Rosemary (illustrator) 2001. My Very First Mother Goose Walker Books: London.
- Opie, Iona (editor) and Wells, Rosemary (illustrator) 1999. Here Comes Mother Goose Walker Books: London.
- Adams, Pam (illustrator) Twinn, M 1973. There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly Child’s Play (International) Ltd: Sydney.
- Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2000 The ABC Book of Nursery Rhymes ABC Books: Sydney.”
