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Music education students deliver music literacy program to city kindergartners

Apples, peaches, pears and plums
Tell me when your birthday comes

On a typical Friday in Bowling Green City School buildings, the kindergartners have been reciting this simple, rhythmic verse as part of an innovative music education program. They repeat the same lines over and over, tapping the fingers together, then again with rhythm sticks, and last with finger cymbals and triangles, as they find the rhythm of the words.

For kindergartners in five of the city’s elementary schools, Fridays are music days, thanks to a program conceived by Joyce Eastlund Gromko, music education. Under the direction of her advanced methods students, they not only learn to sing, dance and play instruments, but also to read a “touch” chart of musical notation.

The more than 150 kindergartners are receiving instruction not offered through the regular curriculum, using instruments donated by Gromko’s mother, Elda Oberheu, who was herself an Iowa schoolteacher.

Based upon many years of her own research, Gromko has adapted the Kodaly Method for teaching musical literacy to very young children. Using all their senses, they learn “multiple representations of musical sound,” Gromko said.

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