While some schools may be able to buy instruments for the classroom, building a guitar out of a cardboard box and rubber bands or tapping on water glasses and noting how the pitch changes as the glass gets emptier is not only fun, but also a quick lesson in basic physics. Children can experiment with creating their own musical instruments.To strengthen the sense of community, she recommends allowing time for children to share their songs and learn what each other has created. “Creating a song is, in a sense, helping kids to create an identity and telling everyone that you are unique,” Dahbi says. Having children write their own music or lyrics, or generate their own rhythms and sounds, helps build a strong sense of self.Let students create music and musical instruments. It could be a conversation starter about languages.” 3. “Kids who may be learning English or who don’t speak English at home can feel included and honored. “It’s great because kids can hear their own language in the first activity they do in the morning which is about welcoming everybody,” says Dahbi. Because these songs are sung every morning, the routine helps ingrain the welcoming, inclusive message in the class culture. Many teachers use songs as a way of greeting children in the morning and these songs could easily be adapted to incorporate phrases in other languages. Incorporate other languages into class songs. In fact, research has shown that young children tend to be much freer in their musical tastes, making this age an excellent time to introduce students to different kinds of musical traditions.
She was always surprised by their choices because they often chose songs that, while still about preschool topics like shapes and colors, sounded like singer-songwriter tunes played on the radio. Introduce children to different kinds of music from a variety of cultures and traditions.Īs a preschool teacher, Dahbi gave her students options when it was time to listen to or sing a song. Here, Dahbi offers five ways educators can use music to not only spark creativity, but also promote multilingualism and build an inclusive classroom culture: 1. Indeed, preliminary survey data from the research team - which includes HGSE professor Meredith Rowe McGill University's Gigi Luk and researchers at The Rowe Lab at HGSE, Anna Kirby, Sarah Surrain, Julie Cusano, and Shan Zhang - suggests that preschool educators with children who are dual-language learners (and speak more than one language at home) in their classes reported using music more often than those educators without these students in their classrooms. “That means it’s easier to get to create and share whatever they feel is representing their ideas, thoughts, and feelings.” student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education conducting research as part of a team that seeks to better understand the ways in which early childhood educators use music in the classroom. “Music is such a wonderful medium for inclusion and communicating across different cultures because it excites everybody and so it reduces barriers,” says Dahbi, a Ph.D. Dahbi also found that music was a powerful way to reflect the identities of the children in her classroom. While music in early childhood classrooms - the nursery rhymes, the good morning songs - lay the groundwork for literacy development, singing and songwriting can also be used to build an inclusive, multicultural classroom.Īs a pre-K teacher, singer-songwriter Mariam Dahbi found music to be an incredible learning tool - and not just because singing along is fun.
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