What Young Children Taught Me About The Science Of Music Abby Connors
Early Childhood Music Specialist
Connors419@aol.com
fascinated by acoustics. Or timbre. Or pitch.
H
That’s what I thought! Most of us were enchanted early
on by the magic of music and its abil- ity to transport us to other realms. For me, participating in a children’s choir, singing with my family while my sister played her guitar, and learning to play the piano filled me with a special and precious joy. I remember the fun and excitement of singing in a school cho- rus, learning songs from “Alice in Won- derland” and “Peter Pan.”
I also learned science in school.
However, finding out about cirrus and cumulonimbus clouds, the digestive system, and protons and neutrons was about as magical as dirt (which we also learned about in science). Science had facts and figures galore, but magic? Not so much.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that I wanted to be where the magic was.
In teaching music to young chil-
dren, my goal was to inspire them with the joy, the beauty and the magic of mu- sic. And it was every bit as heartwarming and fulfilling as I’d imagined to share in their songs and laughter and creativity.
TEMPO
i, music teachers! Raise your hand if you got into music because you were
But… There was one thing that was kind of annoying.
Children kept interrupting my musical activities with “out-of-the- blue,” irrelevant
questions. We’d be
playing shakers and singing, and right in the middle of a song, someone would call out, “Miss Abby? Miss Abby? What’s inside the shaker?” Or we’d be singing “Old MacDonald” while I played the ukulele, and before we even got to “moo-moo” here and “moo-moo” there, someone would ask, “What’re those strings made of?” or try to turn the tuning knobs.
I’m embarrassed to tell you that my
responses – for years – were along the lines of “I don’t know,” “It doesn’t mat- ter,” and “Stop touching the knobs.”
Somewhere along the way, though,
I changed. There was no big epiphany, just a gradual realization that these “ir- relevant” interruptions were valid ex- pressions of curiosity. More than that – they were examples of scientific inquiry. It was all in the way I chose to hear their questions. I started to hear “What’s in- side the shaker?” as “What’s in there that makes the shaker sound like that?” I heard “What are the strings made of?” as “Is there a special kind of string that makes music, or do all strings sound the same?” and (as I gently removed little fingers from my uke) I understood that the child was nonverbally asking, “What do these things do? What will happen if I turn them?”
42 Children engage in scientific
inquiry every day, both verbally and nonverbally, and I’d been ignoring it. I’d passed by so many learning opportunities. So I became determined to delve into the science of music with my young students.
Together, we explored the timbre of
various instruments, objects, and mate- rials. The very young children, two- and three-year-olds, discovered that differ- ent kinds of things produced different sounds. Pre-K’s and kindergartners in- vestigated and compared the timbres of wood, metal, and nylon (plastic) strings; of hitting, shaking, plucking and strum- ming. These older groups asked more “how” and “why” questions and tried many ways to discover the answers.
Catching their enthusiasm and re- sponding to their continuing inquiry, I designed activities to explore: - acoustics (tuning forks fascinated them)
- loudness (always a popular topic, but now we learned how force and distance affected the loudness of sounds)
- pitch (through playing with boom- whackers and glockenspiels, as well as the frets on the ukulele, we dis- covered that pitch is related to size) and
- tempo (in the musical sense of beats per minute; we sang, moved, and played instruments at different metronome tempos)
JANUARY 2018
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