PRIMARY MUSIC

CREATIVELY CONQUERING THE CHALLENGES

Kathryn Hindmarch

With nearly twenty years of teaching experience behind me delivering classroom music lessons to 7-11 year olds, I’m certainly no stranger to the problems that often accompany primary school music-making. From deciding what to teach, coping with aging and limited instruments to working out exactly how to make often complex concepts accessible to pupils with limited prior experience, I think I’ve just about dealt with it all. I genuinely enjoy a challenge and the more creative and memorable the solution the better. With a philosophy of ‘music for all’ and a belief that lessons should always be engaging, 100% participatory and fun, I’ve put together a summary of some of the best strategies I’ve used for conquering the challenges of primary music.

Challenge 1: Broken Instruments

With funds often so stretched, my best solution here is to either bid for money, raise it through selling concert/raffle tickets or become really good friends with the PTFA! My other strategy is to actually involve pupils in making new instruments themselves, ideally linking them to the themes and topics they’re learning about. We’ve made our own guiros (recycled milkshake bottles), sistrums (wire and metal washers –great for those ancient music links), simple shakers (metal money boxes/plastic eggs/ plastic shot glasses taped together) and castanets (folded cardboard pieces with buttons/bottle tops attached). On a considerably larger scale we’ve also made Taiko drums (recycled car tyres and packing tape) and an enormous instrument rig (a metal clothes rail with an assortment of broken but still usable instrument parts suspended from it).

Challenge 2: Noise

There’s no denying that thirty pairs of claves or even fifteen shared glockenspiels can, played simultaneously, make a headache-inducing sound. On the other hand, class sets of plastic pegs, wooden dominoes and even metal parts from hardware shops can be played in a manner similar to claves and the volume is so much more bearable, especially for pupils with auditory sensory needs. After a successful funding bid for thirty headphones and plenty of splitters, our mini keyboards and iPads can now be shared in pairs which has also made a huge difference to classroom sound levels as well as rates of pupil progress and achievement.

My other tactic is to take the music-making outside as much as possible, especially in the summer months. On the tarmac outside our music classroom I like to organise pupils into small groups on mats made from carpet off-cuts (alongside making friends with the PTFA I’d suggest building a good rapport with your local carpet shop –we’ve now got eight excellent recycled music mats!).

Challenge 3: Musical Terminology

I’ve frequently found that the Interrelated Dimensions of Music (or IRDs as I like to call them for short) can be a source of confusion and mistaken identity for pupils. Whenever we can I encourage pupils to actually act them out while they listen to the music. With their help I’ve devised simple actions for each IRD to help make them more memorable and to facilitate ‘stickier’ learning. Examples include moving hands and bodies to show the pitch changes, wiggling lots of fingers or just one or two for texture changes and using fast or slow arm or whole body movements to illustrate the tempo.

We’ve had fun playing musical charades to help reinforce the names and meanings of the IRDs and I’ve also created an IRD board game (great for those last days of term when a small amount of educational game playing is allowed) and IRD active listening sheets which we use while watching short films which have great soundtracks such as ‘The Snowman’.

Challenge 4: Notation

By the time pupils are ready to move to Key Stage 3 it’s fair to say that we’ve done a considerable amount of understanding and using formal notation. Just as pupils’ literacy and numeracy skills need developing and nurturing over many years, I believe that reading music deserves the same staged learning process. Until pupils’ basic understanding of pitch, duration and basic concepts such as ‘is the note in a space or does it have a line through its middle’ are firmly understood, I think any expectation of being able to read successfully from notation is more than likely going to fail.

In our music books the staves are quite small and after a fairly unsuccessful lesson with Year 5 I remember reflecting on exactly why things hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped.

I realised that giving pupils access to much larger staves and having moveable note heads would really help, so after saving a number of metal library shelves from the school skip and creating magnets of various shapes and sizes (circles for note heads, rectangles for bar lines, smaller circles to create dotted notes), I now encourage pupils to learn in a much more physical and kinaesthetic way.

Risk-free mistakes can now be made without the fear of having been written in books and formal notation has become a much more fun and accessible learning process.

Challenge 5: Cross-curricular themes

I’m a strong supporter of cross-curricular learning as I’ve seen first-hand the incredible gains that can be achieved through helping pupils recognise how aspects of their learning interconnect. As long as the development of their musical skills and knowledge is put at the heart of any cross-curricular planning, then I believe that pupils can really benefit from this approach. Stand-out learning examples from recent months include pupils creating fishing dances inspired by the Japanese folksong ‘Soran Bushi’ and group compositions inspired by the shape of the Andes and the sounds made by South American instruments. Alongside the clear geographical links, musically pupils were developing their understanding of graphic scores, timbre, structure and metre, along with improving their keyboard skills and their ability to lead and perform within ensembles.

Throughout my teaching career I can honestly say that I have never yet taught a pupil who hasn’t shown active enjoyment of their musical learning. With the benefits of a well-planned and delivered music education being widely acknowledged, I think it’s a real privilege to be able to witness first-hand their enjoyment and pride at making music together and being able to express themselves creatively. I would encourage all teachers to have the confidence to take risks and to try something new, to capitalise on those cross-curricular links with other subjects and enjoy revealing to pupils the incredible richness of our world’s musical heritage.

Kathryn Hindmarch

Kathryn Hindmarch is a classroom music and piano teacher at Portway Junior School, a large three-form entry school near Derby. In 2019 she was invited to speak at the BBC at the launch of their ‘Trailblazers’ set of BBC Ten Pieces, and she believes strongly in the importance of ensuring that primary music has a strong representation in every curriculum.