Timbre Time!

Exploring musical colour with EYFS

Dr Liz Stafford is editor of Primary Music Magazine, and director of Music Education Solutions.

This term, during England’s latest lockdown, I have been working with a group of key worker children in Reception Class. I have chosen to focus on introducing them to the key musical elements, and so far we’ve had lessons exploring pulse, rhythm, and tempo.

This week’s challenge was timbre, which is always a tricky concept to explain. It’s often described as the ‘colour’ of the music or the ‘quality’ of sound - neither of which is particularly helpful when talking to 4 and 5 year olds! I chose to approach timbre through practical activity, with a brief explanation that ‘every instrument has a different sound’ and that that’s what we would be exploring today.

We started by asking each child to come out to the front, choose an instrument, and play it to the class. As a group we tried to find descriptive words that matched the sound of the instrument - for example ‘jingly’ and ‘tinkly’ for sleigh bells (although one child did shout out ‘Rudolph,’ which took a while to unpick!).

As more and more children had an instrument, we started not only to use describing words, but also to ‘match’ the instruments with other similar sounding ones - asking the children who had already had a turn to hold their instrument up if they thought it matched the one being played by the child at the front.

Once each child had an instrument, we made piles on the carpet of similar instruments - our ‘bangy,’ ‘scratchy,’ ‘jingly’ and ‘rustly’ options each being placed on separate carpet spots. We had to go back through these and invite volunteers to say which instruments were in the wrong place, as some of the children matched the instruments by sight rather than sound - for example putting the maracas into the ‘bangy’ group because they were made of wood like the claves and wood blocks.

The next step for this lesson was to collect all the instruments back in and for me to play a selection one-by-one under a cloth. The children had to identify the instruments by their sound, and I was really pleased that they could not only say whether it was a ‘bangy’ or a ‘jingly’ instrument, but a lot of them could remember the exact name of the instrument too “It’s the sleigh bells!”

Then came the really fun part of the lesson. Each child chose an instrument and then explored our indoor and outdoor spaces trying to find an object that made a similar sound. A kind of musical treasure hunt! There were some really creative choices, such as a running tap to match a rainstick, and lego blocks tapped together to match claves! The children with the bell instruments struggled most, until we remembered that telephones have a ringing sound!

Our final task of the lesson was to use our instruments to add musical colour to a story. My class are currently reading 'Dinosaurs love Underpants' which gave us a great opportunity to use ‘bangy’ instruments for bones rattling together, and all our instruments at once to show the dinosaurs getting cross!

I am lucky in that I have the children for an hour and a half, and their class teacher is very flexible about what I do in that time, leaving me bits and pieces of phonics, handwriting, and numbers, as well as setting out motor skill activities for me to fill the time once we’ve had enough of music. Normally we do around 30 minutes of music and then move onto other things, but this week we used nearly the whole time for our music activities as the children were so engaged! This is definitely an activity that I will be returning to in the future.