Musically Messy Project
Watch as our Nursery community works together to create something beautiful as we celebrate the joy and importance of messy play in early childhood!
To bring together our term's sensory, immersive learning about classical music and art, we invited all our families, friends and staff to dance and splash paint in our special art studio.
For a whole week, our atrium was filled with fun, creativity and collaboration. We are so proud of our families working together to create such a fabulous shared piece of art.
This project provided the opportunity for parents, carers and friends to enjoy the process of exploring feelings and movement with their children. Our wonderful staff were on hand to encourage and help everyone enjoy being part of something much bigger!
This is how our learning unfolded throughout the term as we explored the orchestra, famous musicians, different types of music and linked it to art and movement.
One of our Mummies is a professional flautist and has played in orchestras all around the world. She came into Nursery to share her passion for music and helped us learn all about woodwind instruments.
We began our learning with the book 'Meet the Orchestra' by Ann Haynes and we explored the 4 orchestral families. To help us find out more about the different woodwind instruments, we were lucky to be able to hear, see and try a clarinet, flute and a saxophone.
Our teacher's grown-up daughter came to play her saxophone for us and we enjoyed trying to make sounds with the instruments ourselves.
As part of our immersive, musical art learning, we used our imaginations to build a stage for our own orchestra. Once it was ready, we became the musicians and the audience! We learned to take turns and enjoyed creating music together.
As part of our sensory learning experience about the orchestra, we learned how to play some very special African drums.
We explored the brass section of the orchestra, but discovered that, unlike the strings and woodwind, we didn't have any brass instruments. We used our problem-solving skills to come up with our own solution – designing and making our own!
Every week students from a local secondary school come to volunteer at our Nursery. During our musical art topic we were very lucky that one of the students was a very talented musician. Each week she brought a different one to play for us. We also visited her school to watch her play the piano and see all her friends play in a concert.
We learnt all about the famous percussionist, Sivamani. The children wanted to make their own percussion section so we explored which types of material made the best sounds. When we had decided that metal was the loudest, we asked our local community on Facebook if they could donate old pots or metal objects for us to create a music wall. We were so lucky to receive lots of pipes and pans, as well as an old oil drum, which made a fabulous instrument!
A primary aim of our musical art project was to involve as many families and members of our local community as possible.
So many of our parents and their friends were keen to share their musical or artistic talents with us. Thanks to their skills, the children were able to hear many different types of music, including Bollywood.
A-level students from the Royal Grammar School came to visit with their instruments to help us find out more about music. Some of the pupils could even remember being at our Nursery themselves!
Pupils from another local school, Godstowe, also played a concert for us. They brought an instrument from each of the orchestral families to Nursery and we enjoyed listening to the different sounds they made. We were also very excited to see a real harp!
Our school benefits from very strong community links, which offer many wider learning opportunities.
Maddie studies music at Cambridge. As part of her degree she is exploring how music helps people make connections with each other and how music links to our emotions.
We were very happy to learn all about her saxophone and listen to her play so that she could add to her research into music and connections.
Families joined us to explore how sound and music developed from the beginning of time. The children loved being agents of sound, discovering the history of sound through millennia.
After exploring music and learning all about orchestral instruments, we then extended our creative learning through art.
We learnt all about the artist Jackson Pollock and discovered that he liked to dance while he painted listening to jazz music.
We continued to explore movement, rhythm and creativity through music and art.
Instead of throwing paint like Jackson Pollock, we used our painty fingers to imagine we were playing a piano in time to the music.