When children are 2 – 4 years old, they begin to master keeping a steady beat from an internal source, themselves! If you listen to pots banging, a toddler and preschooler develops the ability to pound to a steady beat that they themselves dictate. Later, children have the ability to match an external beat and keep it steady. That beat may come from a song they like or a conductor and is a vital skill to playing music.
We started, as we often do, with a simple rhyme. This one uses one sound per beat:One for ice cream, two for soda, Three to walk to Minnesota.
In a series of play exercises the children spoke the rhyme while patting their thighs, then practiced patting the steady beat without speaking. Next they practiced the same way with clapping, finally moving on to stepping a steady beat in silence, which is no easy task.
Another activity we began, which will continue throughout the year, is listening for and recognizing sound colors and tones. We used another simple rhyme (Why? They’re very easy and quickly learned!) and practiced saying it using the same dynamic level but with different colors such as high or low voice, nasal voice, etc. Lastly, the children listened to a recording of different faculty members saying the rhyme and used their ears to distinguish who was reciting the poem. Although it is a simple game, it gives confidence to the children that they themselves CAN hear colors in sound and music, and need only learn to describe and use those colors. We will be adding to that listening work all year long.
In children’s choir we worked again on I’d like to Teach the World to Sing concentrating on text, meaning, and adding ideas of color they could add with their voices. We also began a new song, Old Joe Clark, a folk song from the early 20th century stemming from Kentucky and Virginia. It serves to introduce the children to the mixolydian mode, a scale often used in folk songs.
We continue to do pitch matching games to help those who struggle with asking their voice to do what their ears hear. For some, matching pitch is an easy, effortless task but for others it takes quite a bit of work. As a team, singing in unison to one to two notes at a time, there is obvious improvement already.
