Enabling Environments: music and language outdoors

The outdoors at Park View Primary School, Huyton in Knowsley, has seen a transformation in the past few months - from a derelict wooded area at the back of the nursery garden to a superb interactive learning area, with a focus on music and language.

Our aim was address our children's low language baseline when they enter nursery. We wanted to create a multisensory area that:

- supports storytelling and rhyme

- delivers continuous musical provision outdoors.

Music and language development are strongly linked, as both require discrimination and listening skills. Providing contexts for play and exploration though songs and stories allows for development in both areas. The Early Years Foundation Stage guidance and Letters and Sounds Phase 1 both echo these principles, and offering such experiences outdoors adds to children's enjoyment of them.

The area is designed as a trail, which children enter under an archway. As they wander along the path, they encounter features that relate to traditional stories and rhymes or lend themselves to storytelling and developing specific musical skills. These include:

- a Three Bears' cottage

- a bridge over slate 'water', which can be used to explore the Three Billy Goats Gruff or, with the addition of a toy frog, related rhymes

- logs and a grassy bank suitable for storytelling, music sessions and other focused activities

- home-made and commercially available sets of metal tubes, each tuned to a pentatonic scale. The children use plastic bats to play them and each set makes a wonderfully hollow sound

- three upturned barrels of varying heights, which produce three different pitches and which the children 'play' with cut-down broom handles

- tubes, pots and pans, suspended utensils and filled containers

- song and rhyme prompts - some permanent, such as Incy Wincy Spider in his enormous web; others added as appropriate, such as a star to link to 'Twinkle, twinkle'.

The project was funded jointly by Creative Partnerships Merseyside and school governors. Creative Partnerships provided a musician, Mark Jones, to help us develop the project, devise the design and acquire and make musical instruments. Landscape gardener Adam Ladson cleared and prepared the area and provided technical expertise in, for example, constructing large pieces of equipment. Urban Strawberry Lunch (a Liverpool-based group specialising in making music using junk materials) kindly donated tubes and barrels and gave valuable advice, while school staff added resources as the project developed.

The area supports many aspects of the curriculum, but primarily:

Musical development through play

- Creating sound effects using objects and found materials

- Sequencing events through sound

- Creating mood and emotion

- Developing understanding of music concepts such as pitch, duration, structure, dynamics and tempo

- Improvising/exploring with voice.

Language development through play

- Improvising stories and role play

- Retelling stories

- Supporting phonetic development through rhythm and rhyme

- Describing story settings through experience

- Talking for writing developed.

Nicola Hutton and Laura Leddy are teachers at Park View Primary School, Huyton, Knowsley. Nicola has also had five years experience as a lecturer in Primary Music Education at Liverpool Hope University and Laura is an Advanced Skills Teacher for early years for Knowsley Education Authority STORIES AND RHYMES TO USE OUTDOORS

Traditional tales

Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Little Red Riding Hood
The Three Billy Goats Gruff
Sleeping Beauty
The Princess and the Frog
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Popular books

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson (Macmillan Children's Books)

Elmer stories by David McKee (Andersen Press)

We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen (Walker Books)

Lullabyhullabaloo and Kipper's Monster by Mick Inkpen (Hodder Children's Books)

Down in the Woods at Sleepytime by Carole Lexa Schaefer (Walker Books)

Percy the Park Keeper stories by Nick Butterworth (Collins)

Rhymes and songs
'Twinkle, twinkle little star'
'I had a little nut tree'
'Mary, Mary, quite contrary'
'London Bridge is falling down'
'Little green frog'
'Hey, diddle, diddle'
'The sun has got his hat on'
'Sandy girl'
'When Goldilocks went to the house of the bears'
'Mr Bear lives in a cave'
'Incy Wincy spider'
'Little Miss Muffet'
'Hey Mister Bee'
'Spider spins'
'There's a tiny caterpillar'

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Letters and Sounds

Much of Phase 1 of Letters and Sounds can be delivered in the outdoor environment, providing perfect link between music and language development.

Aspect 1 - Environmental sounds

- To develop children's listening skills and awareness of sounds in the environment

- To further develop vocabulary and children's identification and recollection of the difference between sounds

- To make up simple sentences and talk in greater detail about sounds

Aspect 2 Instrumental

- To experience and develop awareness of sounds made with instruments and noise makers

- To listen to and appreciate the difference between sounds made with instruments

- To use a wide vocabulary to talk about the sounds instruments make

Aspect 3 Body sounds

- To develop awareness of sounds and rhythms

- To distinguish between sounds and to remember patterns of sound

- To talk about sounds we make with our bodies and what the sounds mean

Aspect 4 Rhythm and rhyme

- To experience and appreciate rhythm and rhyme and to develop awareness of rhythm and rhyme in speech

- To increase awareness of words that rhyme and to develop knowledge about rhyme

- To talk about words that rhyme and to produce rhyming words

Aspect 6 Voice sounds

- To distinguish between the differences in vocal sounds, including oral blending and segmenting

- To explore speech sounds

- To talk about the different sounds that we can make with our voices

EARLY LEARNING GOALS

The outdoor area will also help children work towards the learning goals for

- Creating music and dance - Recognise and explore how sounds can be changed, sing simple songs from memory, recognise repeated sounds and sound patterns and match movements to music

- Developing imagination and imaginative play - Use their imaginations in art and design, music, dance, imaginative and role-play and stories

Practice Guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage, pages 111-114

CONTACTS

- Park View Primary School, Huyton, Knowsley L36 2LL, tel: 0151 477 8120, Parkview.de@knowsley.gov.uk

- Nicola Hutton, e-mail huttonn1@hope.ac.uk

- Laura Leddy, e-mail laura.leddy@tesco.net

- Mark Jones, e-mail markvjones@gmail.com

- Adam Ladson, AL Landscapes, tel: 07816766501, e-mail adam.ladson@merseymail.com

- Urban Strawberry lunch, tel: 0151 709 7562, usl@usl.org.uk

- TTS Early Steps (singing stop), www.tts-group.co.uk, tel: 0800 318686

- Bingbangbong (outdoor musical instruments), www.bingbangbong.info, tel: 02891 455737.