FREE ESSAY ON SONGS

SONGS

Early is the best time to start children with an enriched musical background. The earlier
the child starts to hear and learn about music, the more enriched and fulfilling the
child's experience of music is going to be. This is even more beneficial for talented
children. A child cannot receive the full benefit of music and will not learn as much or
at all without the first three stages of preparatory audiation. With this in mind, I will
now show you how to guide children through these stages. First of all, we need to look at
resources. For this particular situation, I will have two helpers, two rooms in which to
work (one is furnished with cribs, the other is mostly open space with a carpet). Also, I
will have a good sound system in both rooms (that includes a tape player and compact disc
player), and some money (available to buy recordings and equipment). Next is the age
range of the children. The first stage is Absorption. One of the most difficult things to
do when guiding children through these stages is to know when the right time is to move
them to the next stage. This often requires much patience. The reason that you need so
much patience is because all children move through the different stages of preparatory
audiation at different times. The times when children move are as different as their
handwriting. In the Absorption stage, children are absorbing music. But, not all music is
appropriate. Most of the music that should be played is live music. It should also be
played in different keyalities, tonalities, harmonies, meters, and tempos. When playing
such diverse groups of music it is also important to not play music with words. Why you
ask? Because if you play music with words, the children seem to focus their attention
more on the words than the music itself. Out of the two rooms that we have, I would use
the one room, which has the cribs in it for the children in the absorption stage. This
would be more appropriate for children in the absorption stage than for children in any
other stage because the children in the absorption stage are the youngest. I am going to
give names to my two helpers so that we can easily tell the difference between the two.
The one helper that is going to be helping me with the children in the absorption stage
is named Mary. The other helper, which will help me with the two other stages (random
response and purposeful response), is named Peter. Mary would be playing live music for
the children. Live music and/or any kind of music that you play for children must be
pleasing to the ear. It is also important that children hear a wide variety of
instruments so they are introduced to a variety of pitches and timbres. Another thing is
that children's attention spans are very short. This means that it is best to play only
short sections of music or music with frequent shifts in dynamics, timbre, and tempo.
This encourages children to continually redirect their attention to the music. Once you
think a child is ready to go through the absorption stage, than you can go onto the next
stage, which is random response. But, before a child can go through absorption you must
make sure the child is really ready to go to the next stage. One thing you do not want to
do is to rush a child through each stage. They must be emotionally ready. Even if it
seems like they are mentally or physically ready, you must wait if necessary. I would
practice the beginning order of step two to find out if they are ready. If they are
ready, they will start doing things in step two since step one and two overlap one
another. The way I would be able to tell if they changed is by looking at the different
things they do during this stage. In the second stage children begin to make babble
sounds and movements. These are not coordinated with each other or with aspects in the
environment and should not even be interpreted as an attempt by children to imitate what
they are listening to or seeing, or as a conscious response to what they have listened to
or seen. Adults guiding children at this stage need to understand that at this age
children simply have the need to babble. Another activity that happens during stage two
is group interaction. It is important in this stage that children have this because
children learn much about music as a result of listening to and observing other children
of similar ages as they attempt to sing chant and move. One of the purposes of stage two
of preparatory audiation is to continue children's exposure to music so that they will be
better acculturated to the sound of more complex music than in stage one. Even another
thing that happens during this stage is random movement that is mostly associated with
subjective tonality and subjective meter. Although they make these movements, they should
not be expected to imitate anything. Only the natural sounds and random movements that
children voluntarily engage in should be encouraged. Children are still encouraged to
listen to music as in stage one. Except what is more valuable for them now is to make
much body movement in accordance to different songs. I would start (being the teacher) to
sing and chant to them. At the same time I would be making full use of my body. I would
move my body to the beat of the song or chant. That way the more children have this kind
of movement modeled for them, the more they will begin to experiment with movement
themselves. As in stage one, only short songs and chants in as many tonalities and meters
as possible should be sung and chanted to children, and again, these should be performed
without words or instrumental accompaniment of any kind. Since we have some money to use
for equipment, I might buy some small instruments like a xylophone, wooden blocks, and an
instrument that makes a shaking noise of some sort. Then, after we bought the
instruments, I would chant something to them and then repeat the chant, but instead of
going through the whole chant like I did the first time, I would repeat parts of the
chant and ask somebody if they wanted to play an instrument. When I found three children
that wanted to play the three instruments, I would show these children how to do each
different part of the instrument. We would play the chant and the instruments separately,
then together using simple syllables like bah or bum. The thing that I feel very strongly
about is not expecting much from the children. We would try to sing the song and play the
instruments, but at the same time I would pay special attention to singing the song in
the same keyality, tonality, meter, and tempo. I wouldn't be really strict about playing
the right notes or playing the right tempo. Just having the children experience different
things like that would be enough. Although it might not look like the child would be
learning anything, they actually would. Every little bit of musical experience a child
gets helps to exercise and tone the audiational skills a child has. To help me stay in
the same meter and tempo, I would buy a metronome. At the second stage of Acculturation,
consideration should be given not only to children's tonal aptitude, but also to their
rhythm aptitude. In addition to being concerned with tonal and rhythm aptitudes, parents
and teachers performing for children should pay greater attention to musical expression
and phrasing. A lasting impression can be made on a child's musical sensitivity through
performance of chants. As in stage one of preparatory audiation, unstructured informal
guidance is the rule in stage two of preparatory audiation. We don't really know when
children merge from stage to stage. One thing we do know is that children typically enter
stage three, which is purposeful response, between the ages of eighteen months to three
years old, as soon as they begin to make purposeful responses in relation to their
environment. In this stage children should still continue to listen to songs and chants
with out words, because listening to songs and chants with out words is no less important
and maybe even more important in stage three than in stages one and two. It is also
important that children with high tonal and/or rhythm developmental aptitudes, be
encouraged to begin, but in their own initiative, to create their own songs and chants.
Also in this stage children start to sing and/or chant with the parent and/or teacher,
but the teacher does not expect accuracy. In order to guide a child from stage two to
stage three, you should sing a song or chant, and if they respond to you with the same
response, it's called purposeful response. Another way you can tell when a child is in
stage three is if they start to participate in the singing of tonal patterns and the
chanting of rhythm patterns. It is best to keep tonal and rhythm patters separate during
structured informal guidance for children in this stage. Adults should not perform tonal
patterns immediately after rhythm patterns or other way around, but instead should
perform one or more songs and/or chants between the tonal and rhythm patterns. When
children begin to sing tonal patterns in stage three, they typically sing at the same
time that the parent or teacher is singing. But, adults should not expect children to be
capable or even interested in imitating tonal patterns with any degree of accuracy. When,
however, children in this stage spontaneously sing the same thing as the adult is
singing, that is a signal that the child is ready to make the transition into stage four.
In order for children to give meaning to the tonal patterns they are hearing, they need
to establish syntax. They begin to do this as they gain familiarity with a variety of
tonalities. Only tonal patterns in major and harmonic minor tonalities that move
diatonically (by scale-wise steps) should be sung to children in this stage. In the
classroom, have the children audiate different tonal and rhythm patterns. When doing
different rhythm patterns use your arms and legs and move with the music and try to get
them to do it with you. In doing this, the child should pick