Nursery
Autumn 2016, Week 6
Finger rhymes and fine motor skills
The class walk into the Music Room wide eyed. While at school these children only leave the Nursery itself to eat lunch and to have music lessons. Some look a little wary. I am seated on a chair that is on the opposite side of the room to the door. I sing ‘Come and sit with me’. The children sit down all over the place. I hold up my fingers and stretch them all out straight. Being children quite a few simply copy me. I say the ‘Ten Little Soldiers’ rhyme several times.
It’s fun at the end because the ‘soldiers’ end up hidden behind my back and I ask, with apparent bewilderment, “Where are they?”
I notice that one boy cannot stretch his fingers out straight. These finger-rhymes would have been standard in another age but now they may or may not be seen in nurseries. Fine motor skills help all manner of grown up skills develop, not least holding a pen and writing. The woodwind tutor here at my school told me of a Year 5 pupil who lacked the fine motor coordination to lower one finger without lowering several others.
We move onto a couple of movement songs that takes the class from settled and seated to moving around the room. Some are stepping in time with the beat, many are not; at this young age the movement alone is just as important as being precisely in time. I segue from one song into the next without missing a beat, like a DJ. I always end ‘Ring-a-Roses’ (when the children are collapsed on the floor) with a little rhyme:
“Down at the bottom of the deep blue sea,
Catching fishes for my tea,
How many fishes do you see?
One, two, three!”
I ask the question several times in an effort to have everyone joining in. They love this and there is an increased involvement.
Next we head off from the seaside singing ‘Down the Road’ as we go. I encourage joining in with this simple, repetitive song but most do not. This is their sixth music lesson ever at Manorfield. I draw attention to a picture of some swallows, one or two children name the birds because we’ve done this song before. It’s a ‘Colourstrings’* song that I like because it’s very simple (two notes) with several calm phrases and one lively one; the actions, naturally follow this.
The lesson remains very active as we move into a song called ‘Everybody Walk With Me’ which is sung to the tune of London Bridge. It ends with a ‘Ready, steady, stop!’ The children enjoy stopping and standing still like statues at the end. The class are so excited by this that, encouraged by one especially loud boy, many of them scream at the end. This has to be directly addressed because it sounds horrible.
I hold up a picture of some bananas growing on the plant. They have heard this chanting rhyme nearly every week:
“Bananas, bananas, clap, clap, clap
Bananas, bananas, flap, flap, flap
Bananas, bananas, click, click, click
Bananas, bananas, flick, flick, flick
Bananas, bananas, bump, bump, bump
Bananas, bananas, jump, jump, jump”
As a class they manage this independently with 3 or 4 more confident children carrying it along.
Next I bring everyone together and hold up a sweet picture of a sleeping baby and teach them another ‘finger rhyme’ called ‘Here is the Baby’. After so much lively activity the class are focused on this new rhyme, especially the girls. They learn it by hearing it several times, I don’t attempt to formally ‘teach’ them it.
We end with a picture of sleeping bunnies. One by one the children settle down ‘asleep’ on the floor, curled up like sleeping bunnies. It’s a fun song to finish with because it ends with the bunnies hop-hop-hopping. I don’t expect them to join in but some know it quite well and are sort of humming along.
As the class leave I talk with a child psychologist who has been observing throughout. She explains some of the background to two children who have been unable to follow the lesson alongside their peers. Sometimes the reasons for this are emotional and sometimes they are developmental. It can be difficult to ascertain.
*Colourstrings started life in Finland in 1971 and is now to be found in London too; it is a Kodaly-based approach to learning string instruments; it makes use of numerous especially composed songs and ‘Swallows’ is one of these.