Children learn best through their play, and their play is sophisticated and often complex. Unfortunately, children in Western societies have less free time to play than they used to.
Much of children’s after-school time is taken up with adult directed activities such as sports, school activities, and tutoring. School days are longer, and recess, which is heavily supervised, is shorter. As a result, children are less often going outside to play with one another. This is not only concerning for the education of children; psychologist Peter Gray has also noted a relationship between the decline in play and an increase in various mental health problems. For children’s healthy development, having unstructured, free time to play is crucial.
One of the structured after-school activities in which children often participate is the music lesson. In traditional Western music education, teachers often teach their child students using similar methods applied to the teachers themselves in university, by using formal, teacher-directed, and hierarchical approaches. While these approaches are efficient and direct methods of communicating musical skills and knowledge, music teachers can provide child students with much-needed play time by facilitating play-based learning methods. Not only will these approaches provide child students with the opportunity to play within a typically structured activity, but they will also provide teachers with a variety of creative approaches for teaching music to the specific skills and needs of each student.
A first step to incorporating musical play into lessons is to simply have a puppet, or a stuffed animal, in the lesson space. Puppets serve as musical friends in the lesson, and their existence allows for musical play that is socially interactive. For some teachers, these puppets might have names, personalities, and identities. For others, they may be blank slates. It is possible that the puppet’s name and personality will be formed through the child’s play in lessons. The puppet may just sit nearby, watching and listening. A teacher might have the puppet teach the lesson or ask the child to teach the puppet. The teacher might play a piece of music while the child makes the puppet dance. Students will regularly come up with playful activities or ways to incorporate puppets into the music lesson, and teachers can encourage play-based learning by embracing the spontaneity and variety of children’s choices and by allowing freedom to experiment with those choices.
For greater interaction, puppets or stuffed animals with larger and more manipulable faces could be favoured, seeing as a teacher could change the puppet’s emotion by moving its face or mimicking human body language. Regular slight movements of a puppet’s head can resemble the natural movement of living beings. More movement can imply excitement, happiness, or nervousness. Stillness can imply listening, interest, shyness, or sadness. Depending on the puppet’s face, a teacher can adjust how its facial expressions look by either pinching at the neck or the forehead, or by tilting the head up or down. As often as possible, a teacher can encourage the student to make connections between the puppet’s emotions and the music. This form of imagined musical play could help children develop a deeper understanding of human emotions and connect this understanding to their music.
Teachers can also encourage play with small world toys, which are realistic miniatures resembling large, everyday objects that adults use. Prime examples of small world toys include toy cars, construction vehicles, and doll houses. Musical instruments can be large and heavy, and most often, children’s physical exploration of them is limited. A realistic miniature toy piano, for example, could help children explore the instrument in a way that is controllable and less intimidating for them. There are a variety of types and styles of toy instruments, but it can be especially exploratory for children if parts of the toys can move (i.e., if the piano lid can be lifted, if the pedals can be pressed, etc.). The toy can be handled easily by children, allowing them to learn by taking it in their hand, looking at it, flipping it over, tapping it, and more.
Teachers need not spend large amounts of money on small world toys. Students could make their own little instruments out of a small cardboard box and some paper, glue, and crayons. Since the children themselves drew it, they will be connected to what it is and what it means, potentially even more so than they would be with a realistic small toy that was purchased. Furthermore, while the children draw, they will be envisioning and recreating the instrument to the best of their abilities, which encourages another level of imaginative exploration of the instrument. While teachers might not have time to do this craft in a lesson, they could simply have the children draw on a piece of paper or send their students home with the materials.
Small world toys and puppets together allow for pretend musical play in various ways. For example, if students have an upcoming performance, they could choose an animal performer, set up other puppets as audience members, set up the miniature instrument, and act out the full performance with toys, including walking up to the stage, bowing, putting music on the stand, adjusting the seat, sitting down, taking a breath, playing the piece (and here, the student can go to the real instrument and play), bowing while the audience claps, walking back down to the chair. Students may even want to do this more than once. The repetition of this activity could allow the students to continually imagine a positive outcome for the object of their fears.
Teachers can also take imaginative activities to the level of drama within music lessons. For example, after acting out a recital with small puppets and toys, students could pretend that they themselves are now playing in the recital. The student’s audience may still be the puppets, but the child is the one acting, instead of another puppet. In the case of a dramatized recital, the students would be putting themselves in the position of their future selves and practicing the feelings that one might experience in a future recital. To facilitate this activity, a teacher might find a simple prop to be useful. For example, a teacher might place a scarf on the floor to represent the path that the student walks down as they make their way from their seat in the audience to the stage.
Another form of drama that can be used in private music lessons is role reversal. In role reversal, the student becomes the teacher, and the teacher becomes the student. The child sits in the teacher’s chair and listens to the “student” play a piece of music. After listening, the child might offer suggestions. As a “student,” the teacher might ask leading questions, such as “Is my hand position correct?”, “Am I starting on the right note?”, or “What can I try next?” The teacher might ask the child for help: “What note is this?” or “Can you point along while I play?” Rather than waiting for the teacher to correct mistakes, the student is now responsible for providing correct information to the “student.” In role reversal, a students’ imagined musical worlds are a place where they are the teacher, know about the instrument, have skills at the instrument, and are trusted to share their knowledge and skills.
Since children’s musical play is multimodal, teachers can also use drama to invite spontaneous movement and dance into music lessons. To incorporate dance and movement into pretend play, a music teacher could suggest that they are all at a ball, and the teacher and student take turns dancing while the other plays. In a similar vein, freeze dance is a fantastic game for encouraging spontaneous movement and dance. With freeze dance, the teacher faces away from the student and plays music while the student dances. Suddenly, the teacher chooses to stop playing and looks up, and the student has to freeze! They can continue this way for several rounds, switch the music, or switch places. Freeze dance is a great first activity in lessons, helping students and teachers begin on a playful and goofy note!
While teachers can aid their child students’ musical learning by incorporating moments of play in lessons, teachers may be hesitant to incorporate play-based learning into their lessons. Time constraints can limit free play activity. Music exam, festival, and competition deadlines might be looming over each lesson. Play-based learning activities might be seen as impossible, or, at the very least, difficult with certain students who may have behavioural or attention difficulties. Teachers can each pick and choose which methods might work for them and their students, and the activities will grow and change as each student interacts with and shapes them. What is most important for the child’s learning is that the teacher observes, allows for spontaneity and choice, and provides various options for playfulness and experimentation!
Written by Bronwyn Schuman, Founder of Music Theory Playground™ (Originally written for ARMTA in 2024)