Music One2One Article for Trio Childminders’ Newsletter November 2005
Alisha held the piece of newspaper up hiding her face. Tanya, her childminder watched and then covered her own head with her paper. ‘Ah…….Boo’ cried Alisha, pulling the paper down into her waist, and Tanya blew her page so that it flopped up and down. Alisha covered her head and copied.
‘Do as I’m doing, follow, follow me’ we sang as we crunched, stamped on, waved and tore into shreds the ‘Property Weekly’. We must have sung it ten times at least, as more and more ideas came from both adults and children. Tidying up was fast and easy when it was made into a song. To the tune of ‘The farmer’s in his den, we sang the words, ‘It’s time to tidy up’ and the task was done.
Then out came the sounds treasure baskets; collections of clattering small pebbles tied in socks, wooden egg cups and chrome jelly dishes bought at a charity shop, which rang when you knocked them together, and a wok lid which boomed if you hit it with a wooden spoon.
These three examples give a flavour of the kind of musical activities offered by Alison Street and Tracey Milne of Music One2One, a project based at Exeter University and funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust and Youth Music. We aim to find out helpful ways of using music with children under two years old to help their general development. This year we have worked in Oxford, Banbury and Bicester with small groups of families and on a one-to-one basis alongside parents, childminders and family centre workers. Between September and November we have run workshops at drop-in sessions for the Trio Childminding Network in Bicester, Banbury and Chipping Norton.
Kate Rudd from Trio says, ‘It’s great to see how music helps the interaction between child and adult – and it shows that you don’t have to go out and spend lots of money to make music’.
For information on training and workshops, contact Alison Street on 01865 371748, streetalison@aol.com and visit the One2One website on www.education.ex.ac.uk/music-one2one.
