Confluence

Parents and Toddlers

Throughout the project Karen Wimhurst and Helen Porter have worked in a variety of ways with parents and toddlers, often through workshops with organised groups. One of our criteria was to work with as many people as possible between the ages of 18 - 30. Through work with parent and toddlers we could meet young parents who might otherwise be excluded from arts work due to circumstance, whether isolation, pressure of time, financial considerations, transport &c.

Working with toddlers is also a fairly direct means of 'audience building': the ear is the first sense organ to develop, in early stages of pregnancy, so a baby's perception of sound is built in right from the start. Mothers have always engaged in singing, knee-jogging and clapping with their children. Music provides a primary way of relating to the world. Rhythmic identities, the sound of the voice, responding to music, all these are crucial to a person's development - but there is often very little musical support given to parents and young children, despite this being a crucial time for developing musical instincts.

There are a wealth of children's rhymes, lullabies and clapping games handed down through the generations to support us. However, due to the pressures of modern life and the ubiquity of artificial entertainments, the strands are being undone, songs slip out of memory and are forgotten. We become estranged from our voices and sing less with our children.

Starting singing groups with this age group is like laying foundations for a healthy musical culture. With help, these proliferate fast. Given encouragement parents can easily find a way of running their own informal singing sessions.

New songs for every occasion can be made, tailored to your child.... songs for that scary hairwash, songs which get unwelcome hats and boots on, songs for the bathtub, as well as a sing through of all those nursery classics.

Helen and Karen initally worked with several established Parent and Toddler groups. Workshops comprised six weekly sessions in the playgroup on one weekday morning per week. The first session would start with a walk to the river. In places such as Mere, the river (the Shreen) is very shallow and ideal toddler paddling territory. For some parents the walk was well known, for others it was as yet undiscovered. Having been thus discovered, it begins to be treasured as a leisure spot for all the family, and as such a place to be looked after and protected.

After singing together by the water and paddling with the children, we returned to the playgroup and used the experience as a background for brainstorming song titles to be written in later sessions.

In the following session we had an introductory singing circle with the children in which a selection of songs were introduced covering all appropriate categories; naming songs, clapping songs, action songs, knee-jogging songs, finger rhymes, sing-a-longs etc. We also composed our first children's song together.

The subsequent sessions settled down into a routine. After a 'naming song' for the children and a quick vocal warm-up for the parents, we would invite the children (accompanied by vocal sounds, percussion etc.) to help a cloth river emerge from its box. We then sang a set of songs around the river. Some of these involved making waves with the cloth river, going 'under-water' , jumping over a stormy river as the cloth river is snaked along the floor. Others are about knee-jogging, river action songs, things to be done on a one to one basis with the parent.

After about forty minutes the group adjourned for coffee. In the second half of the session toys would be brought out. While the children played, we would write a song to be used in the session the following week. At the beginning Karen provided a skeleton of songs for the river theme. As the weeks went on the parents themselves wrote their own material to fill the gaps. In Mere, they also wrote a local river carol which we recorded to be played in the local super markets over Christmas.

With children of this age, a couple of sessions are necessary to establish the routine and conquer shyness (both on the parents part and their children). Then the sessions start to take off. Parents find themselves singing the songs at home as they become more familiar. There's often a real thrill at seeing the songs you've written in the group work well in the session the following week. Children start to sing along, play the instruments and anticipate the action songs. Parents who are resistant to singing gradually begin to feel less threatened.

Some of the parents and children from Mere came along to the first session in Wincanton to pass on their river songs. Some continued coming to Wincanton on a regular basis. As well as being valuable as a music exchange, this was also socially useful: Mere and Wincanton, though geographically near, are in separate counties (Wiltshire and Somerset respectively) with the consequence that public transport and other such social connexions are limited: Mere people naturally gravitate towards Salisbury, Wincanton towards Yeovil. Through this parent and toddler work, we began to inspire new criteria for connexion.

As with most kinds of group activity, it is largely the enthusiasm and commitment of the participants which makes it work. We were lucky to have a few parents who were very supportive and enthusiastic of our work, and who attended every week. One of the first people we came into contact with on the project was Sue Langford. Sue ran the Mere Mums and Toddlers group, and opened her arms to us with great enthusiasm. She and her daughter Becky (13 when the project began) subsequently joined in with the new choir for the carolling, and became regular members of the community choir Shreen Harmony. They also attended the Irresponsible Song workshops in the autumn, and joined the composers workshops. Sue and Becky have recently composed works for the Watershed trio under the guidance of Karen Wimhurst. Sue proudly announced that Becky had been awarded three grade 'A's for her music. Sue feels sure that this is a result of the vast amount of musical activity which has been on offer to Becky from the Confluence project this past year. Becky herself is now saying that she is keen to work as a community musician, and participated in the Legends of the Stream residential course at Springhead in 2000.

The advantages of working with established groups was that it was a time and place that people already knew and would be attending as a matter of course, and that people who normally might not have come towards such an activity would overcome their reluctance when seeing their friends and their children actively participating. This was not without some disadvantages, however: some attempts to work in this environment suffered from the physical problem that there was no space to hold a separate workshop. This meant working amidst the general melée of toys and conversation, which is not conducive to drawing in two-year-olds and their mother/father for a concentrated period. There was also an awareness that we still might be missing those who don't attend such groups, whether for social, financial or transportational reasons, and also that gatherings are often used primarily as a social arena they might be felt an inappropriate use of the time by some attendees.

A small group of parents were very keen to participate in music activities. As these were spread across a number of established community groups, it seemed that there was potential to set up our own group, which might also locate itself in such a way that it would draw in those excluded from the other gatherings due to rural isolation &c. However, the work proved difficult to schedule, partly due to timetable clashes with the potential participants, and the people interested in joining the group were drawn into other work.

Given the limitations of work within established groups, and the impracticality of establishing an ad hoc group of our own, Helen and Karen began to explore other ways in which this audience might be engaged with.

During the work at Gillingham and the Stour villages, Helen approached Helen Pengelly, local co-ordinator for the Music with Mummy scheme, which has similar objectives to the work Karen and Helen had been doing as part of Confluence, but without the environmental imperative. She has small children herself, and there is a waiting list to join her sessions. Having small children herself means that she is connected with this world. Her sessions also take place in her own home which makes them appear to be perhaps less threatening. It was felt that rather than duplicating the music-making effort that was being made by Music with Mummy, it might be of more value for Helen Porter to help her with voice and workshop training; ideas from Confluence would then filter into the work she was engaged in across the region. As a consequence, Helen Pengelly joined in a number of Confluence activities (including Irresponsible Song and the Confluence Performing Club) and has benefited from one-to-one training provided by Helen Porter.

Karen also supported early years leaders in workshop sessions at the Elmrise Early Years Centre in West Howe near Bournemouth. This followed a request from Bournemouth Borough Council to offer training for trainers - giving materials, confidence and experience they could pass on to others. Twelve participants, a mixture of early years leaders and mothers came along, a number of them taking the course as a part of their NVQ training in child care.

The workshop session produced a dramatic scena called The Frog Who Woke Up Too Soon. The morning was a mostly practical singing work, demonstrating the use of different categories of songs for the under fives, how to use puppets, rhythm sticks, structure a group &c. There was also discussion about the importance and benefits of music work for this age group.

The afternoon was a creative session led by Karen. The structure for the work was a story about a frog, living in a mill pond on the Stour. When initially told that the group were going to write the songs for the story, there was general consternation and anxiety from the group. So the enthusiasm and self-confidence at the end of the session when everyone had composed the songs stood in stark contrast to the fears at the beginning. The Stour and water as a general theme was then carried by the leaders back to play group sessions where costumes and properties were made. Karen subsequently returned to West Howe to ensure that the participants were confident with the songs they had written and could take them to the play groups to teach.

The group finally came together in the half term to have a story-telling featuring local musicians Pied Piper, who had worked with an after-schools group and created a small children's ensemble to play along with the story.

The work has since received a number of performances and over 200 people and children have taken part.