With the help of "Mr. Dragon," BGSU methods student Brian Maxwell leads a "call and response" song with Bowling Green kindergartners.

City kindergartners becoming musically literate with BGSU students' help

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 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.

“Young children can become fluent in the language of music,” according to Gromko. Her system provides a highly structured approach to teaching them to read, write and think in musical sound.

Using carefully selected songs, the BGSU students lead the kindergartners through three activities: the “Sing and Swing” beginning song, a middle song that is limited in its rhythmic and tonal elements, and the “Wind-up Song,” which “says goodbye in a happy way,” as Gromko described it.

Each child wears a tag on a string around the neck with pictures or marks denoting the essential components of music—high/low, fast/slow and loud/soft. After they have sung, danced and played a song, they touch the corresponding pictures or marks to encode the musical sound in their minds.

It is the middle song on which the students focus most closely, listening carefully to all its parts. Through careful attention to its pitch, rhythms and volume, they begin to listen differently, Gromko says. “Eventually, the training helps them listen to all the world better,” she said.

A recent Friday found the students working on the “apples, peaches” song, led by Brian Maxwell, a junior performance and piano pedagogy major from Zanesville. “It’s all literacy based,” he said of the teaching system. “It’s very different from my background, but I like it because it’s all very obviously going somewhere.”

Maxwell led the young students through a precise series of exercises, modeling each movement and step along the way, with the help of Kimberlee Taylor, a junior from Grafton, Ohio, and a large puppet called “Mr. Dragon.”

Over the course of a semester, the kindergartners will learn to “read” 10 songs in the 20-song repertoire. The songs are a lively mix of folk tunes from the United States—including African-American tunes—China, Hungary, Mexico and other countries. There has even been a Zulu song in the repertoire. “Children learn languages very quickly,” Gromko noted.

Songs are mostly sung in the keys of F or G, very high, which suits children’s vocal development at that age. The male BGSU students must sing in falsetto to achieve the light, bell-like sound, Gromko said.

The program encompasses a variety of learning styles, by combining kinesthetic, tactile, visual and aural elements. “We draw on color, language, shapes—everything we can to help them see the music in their mind,” Gromko said. Through dance, the children learn to “feel the beat in their feet,” she added, and, because visual representation in dance is important, they use colorful silk scarves, also donated by Mrs. Oberheu.

The instruments include hand chimes spanning two octaves; finger cymbals; triangles; egg shakers; large and small hand drums; the guiro, a Spanish instrument in which a stick is drawn across a ridged block, producing a clicking sound; rosewood claves (another form of wooden rhythm instrument), and jingle bells.

The program also helps fill a void in today’s typical kindergarten classroom, in which there always used to be a piano played by the teacher, and instruments were a regular part of a child’s day. Gromko comes from a heavily German part of Iowa, where “we were part of a rich musical tradition before we ever got to school.”

Research has shown that musical training can improve young children’s performance in other areas of cognitive development, Gromko said. “Music is the natural language of children, and it translates to other systems,” she noted.

The program benefits not only the kindergartners but the methods students as well. Each semester, they learn about 20 new songs, adding to their own resource base. Though they follow the principles set forth by Kodaly and Gromko, each is responsible for his or her own classroom and brings individual talents and emphasis to it.

The program gives the students, who are mostly juniors, additional classroom experience before they do their student teaching in their senior year with master music teachers in the public schools in and around Bowling Green.

By the time they reach Gromko’s classroom-methods class, they have had classes in music history and performance and aural skills. The music-teacher education curriculum for elementary music specialists spans pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. “It’s a tough curriculum,” Gromko said.

Gromko’s own career has reflected the variety inherent in a music education teacher’s life. She has been a K-12 choral director in her native Iowa and has taught in inner-city schools in California populated by black, Samoan and Mexican-American children; at the elite Sidwell Friends school in Washington, D.C., and at Punahou School in Hawaii, where the K-12 population was a mix of Chinese, Japanese and Caucasian. In this area, she teaches not only at BGSU but also provides the music program at the local Montessori school and spent a year developing a music program in East Toledo schools.

Kindergartners practice keeping the beat with their "finger clapping."