A WORD ABOUT SINGING WITH CHILDREN

As the perfect combination of fun and learning, singing and making music are hugely enjoyable activities for children, and are two of those things you learn by simply ‘doing it’. Everyone has a natural inclination to respond to music in all its forms, often unconsciously by tapping toes or clicking fingers, and consciously, we often find ourselves joining in a song we hear and like. Almost all of us enjoy singing along, with or without the ‘air guitar’! And our desire to sing along is a natural expression of who we are and our individual ability to be creative. Indeed, childhood songs stay with us for life and form the basis of music therapy with older people who suffer from dementia.

Singing also creates a bond between people in all kinds of situations: the football song in the stadium, the Last Night of the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall and the karaoke in the pub are modern examples of this. In the same way, our ancestors would have sung together while working together, especially doing mundane work, as singing enlivens boring physical tasks such as digging in the fields, and soldiers would march more effectively with a good rhythmic song. In rural Italy, villagers still sing traditional songs together while crushing the grapes from local vineyards – usually by dancing on them in bare feet!

Singing is an aerobic activity so it is very good for the health of both adults and children because it requires deeper breathing than normal and a good level of breath control. No special skills are required to sing along with friends or to sing in a group or class but everyone can have the pleasure of singing better with a few simple techniques. The voicebox is a muscle which benefits from exercise and a little training, and these will provide vocal improvements as well as useful training for the ears too.

Some people have a natural talent for singing ‘in tune’, in other words, singing a tune correctly and in a choir or group, singing the same tune or choral part as everyone else. Other people have to work at it. The basic ear training starts with good listening. Start by listening to a single, continuous, musical note, either played on an instrument or sung by another person. Then try and sing it, listening carefully to the sound you are making. Ask yourself if your voice sounds the same as the note you hear. If it is the same, then you are singing in tune. If it sounds different, try and decide if you are singing above or below the note you hear, and then adjust your voice to sing lower or higher to make the sounds the same. You may need to repeat this exercise several times, so that you feel more confident about singing in tune. There is a general tendency for singing pitch to drop so try smiling as you sing – this physically lifts the face and vocal cords and helps singers to stay in tune, and it enhances enjoyment.

To help children sing better too, encourage them to spend a little ‘ear training’ time listening carefully to two separate sounds and asking them if the first was higher or lower than the second. And when you teach children a new song, demonstrate visually whether the tune is going up or down, and emphasise a particularly high or low note with gestures.

Although we may sit to play instruments, when we are just singing, it is a good idea to stand with the feet slightly apart and the back straight. Practice a few deep breaths to warm up, using the lower part of the chest rather than by raising the shoulders. To check whether you are doing this properly, place your hands on your ribs just above your waist and ‘think fat’! As you breathe in, you should feel your ribs expanding outwards. As you breathe out, don’t let the air all rush out at once; you should feel your ribs gradually move back into their normal position. Breathe in and out slowly like this for a couple of minutes. Ask the children to do the same exercises, especially emphasising the need for deep breathing in the lower part of the lungs.

Then, to develop breath control, breathe in quickly and breathe out slowly, which is what you actually do when you are singing. Do this for another minute or two, and ask the children to imagine they are gently blowing away a feather in front of their faces.

Then start warming up the vocal cords with a good, strong humming session to get all the passages vibrating around the voicebox in your throat. Do some swooping noises from low to high pitch and back again. Try to push the sound down into your chest as well, and make sure you breathe with your ribs rather than your shoulders. When singing with children, ask them to take a deep breath and then sing the numbers, starting at 1, 2, 3 ... until they run out of breath. Aim for a big score! 

Among the warm-up ‘noises’, it is a good idea to include some nasal singing, making singing sounds through your nose. For this, you need to ‘think snooty’ and enjoy having a good sneer without insulting anyone!

Singing songs usually involves moving from note to note, higher and lower. Many singers find it useful to sing scales, a sequence of eight notes, upwards from a low note and downwards from a high note. Show children this idea by demonstrating visually a series of little ‘steps’ up and then down with the notes as you sing up and down the scales. Then try a sequence of broken chord notes, known as arpeggios – think of the ‘merrily, merrily, merrily’ notes in the well-known round Row, row, row your boat. Again, demonstrate a series of hops and skips visually, moving up and down as you sing higher and lower notes, either with your hands and arms or with a puppet jumping up with higher notes and down with lower notes.

 You may have heard of the tonic sol-fa sequence: doh, re, mi, fah, soh, la, ti, doh, sung memorably in the film The Sound of Music. This system designates note positions in the scale of eight notes, rather than note names: A, B, C, D, E, F, G and then A again. It’s a bit like a footballer having a name (John Smith) and a team position (goalkeeper). Don’t worry if you find this confusing – let your ears tell you when you are singing from lower notes to higher notes and back again. To get an idea about how this sounds, use a well-known tune, such as Row, row, row your boat, which starts with low notes, moves up gradually to high notes, and then comes back down again to the low notes you started with.

To help with the articulation required for singing words clearly, try singing little phrases like ‘copper-plated kettle’ (for consonant sounds) and ‘alleluia’ (for vowels). Try the words on a single note to start with, and then try singing the words on a sequence of notes, going up and down between three or four lower and higher notes, or as scales. Other useful phrases could be train noises: clickety-clack, tick-tack ticka tacka, diddle-dee-dah, or sounds that imitate music instruments: boom diddy boom, plinkety plankety plonk, zoom ziggy zum, tarra-ra boom-dee-ay.

Finally, relax the shoulders and neck, roll your head a little from side to side and forwards and backwards, put your smile firmly in place and you’re ready to go!

SUMMARY

Practise breathing deeply and controlling the flow of breath as you breathe out; encourage children to use the lower parts of their lungs. Shoulders down!

• Warm up the vocal cords with some humming noises, swooping sounds and nasal sounds.
• Practise singing scales and arpeggios, but if children find this difficult, choose some well-known songs, like Row, row, row your boat, which do the same thing.
• For articulation, ask the children to sing words or little phrases with a wide variety of vowel and consonant sounds eg. Copper-plated kettle, clickety-clack, tarra-ra boom-dee-ay.
• Relax the shoulders and neck.
• Smile!