Artful, Tuneful, Beatful

One of the things I am very interested in doing this year is introducing some exploratory centers into the music classroom. Its no secret that free-choice time and play are very important in early-childhood learning, so why shouldn’t the music room incorporate these philosophies as well?

I wanted to do this last year, but as it was my first year at a new school the idea got lost in the shuffle. This year I am being given three laptop computers for students to use in my room as part of a 21st Century Learning initiative my district is implementing. The laptops became the impetus for finally getting serious about centers.

My first challenge was space. I do not have a large room and it was not immediately obvious to me how I would define different areas to serve as each center. The solution to this turned out to be simplifying my life and getting rid of everything I could. Notably I got rid of my teacher desk as I have a nice cabinet and bookshelf to keep my stuff in and on and I spend very little time sitting at my desk anyway. This opened up the space previously designated as “mine” to become the technology center.

Now that I had space I had to come up with some ideas. Obviously my first center would be technology, but what to do with the other 15 kids while 3 are on the laptops? After googling and reading many forum threads I found a great idea for a singing center using either a vacuum hose or a curved piece of PVC to create a “phone” for kids to sing into. This carries the sound of their voice directly into their ear which first of all makes them quite excited and second of all assists them in developing an in-tune singing voice. Once I stopped thinking of centers are something elaborate I had to construct and realized how simple they could be the ideas started flowing. My other center ideas so far are:

• Instruments
• Scarves (creative/dramatic play)
• Picture Books
• Listening
• Water play
• Boomwhackers

I owe a great debt to Dr Mark Turner’s website about music centers both for the ideas I came up with and the overall approach to centers.

Of course what I REALLY still want is an iPod center for listening, but I’m still waiting for a grant for that one!