Notice how the practitioner in the small daycare scenario noticed the child’s interest in wooden sounds and introduced another woodblock to extend that play. The activity usually remains at a low-level with little or no adult intervention to extend and enrich it. But all too often a few instruments are set out for children to explore on their own and it’s left at that. So familiar, you may think, that I can just mention it and move on to other ways of using instruments in more structured activities.

Here I’ve illustrated this idea with a daycare setting and younger children, but the idea of setting out instruments for children to explore and play with freely is a familiar one in most early years provision. In these articles about early years music I’m emphasising the idea of music as a form of self-initiated play that’s integrated into the everyday and ongoing activity of the early years setting. The child becomes interested in this new sound, going back and forth between the different instruments and setting them out on the carpet in a row to tap along in sequence. Seeing his interest, one of the practitioners finds a larger woodblock. On the carpet one child is concentrating on playing two-tone woodblocks with the beaters and listening very carefully to the different sounds they produce. In another part of the outdoor area they’ve laid out a blanket and on it placed some wooden instruments – mostly for tapping with small-handled wooden beaters. The suspended instruments seem to encourage larger body movements, swinging and jumping to play them or running back and forth to strike them on the move.

The children explore different ways of playing the instruments and sound makers. In a daycare group caring for one- to two-year-olds, the staff have strung up a rope across a corner of their outdoor play space and from this line suspended a number of interesting sound-makers: plastic drinking bottles filled with fine grained materials for shaking two twists of heavy-duty sleigh bells and two sets of thick bamboo chimes. Susan Young continues her exploration of early years music with a look at the value of instruments and other sound-makers…

How to make music without instruments