All That Jazz

"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus 

The Mission:

The teaching team has decided on 'musical genres' as a two-week theme.  

I have been allocated two days, and I already know where my heart is tugging me.  Jazz.  I must figure out a way to present Jazz to these kiddos, and see where they take it.   

The Research:   

I've always loved Jazz.  It's a love affair that is instinctual, and not based on any sort of authority.   And goodness knows, it's also not based on me having any actual musical talent.  Jazz  has always matched the way my brain works.  And how my body moves.  I hope that makes a bit of sense.  It began with Gene Kelly, and standards, when I was five.  Then for whatever the reason, over the years I've fallen in love with Charlies Mingus, Charlie Parker and Ella Fitzgerald. 

Watching the Ken Burns Documentary made me more comfortable in my knowledge base.   (Ken Burns = The shortcut to authority haha).  

Knowing the history, and key players, and reasoning -- the why and the how and the path -- helped my confidence and credentials, but not necessarily my ability to present this information to children.   

The thing I know about preschoolers:  history and facts are all well and good, but figure out the root of a concept and not its historical importance and you'll see the most fantastic and wondrous explorations.

It's not enough to tell a child:  "This is important, let me tell you why."   instead I prefer to say "I think this is interesting."   and if they agree, then we go off on a journey of taking ownership of that concept. 

So.  First things first, we begin with a bit of wikipedia. 

And right away, there's quote paydirt: 

In a 1988 interview, trombonist J. J. Johnson said, "Jazz is restless. It won't stay put and it never will".

Heh.  Replace  'Jazz'  with 'Three-Year-Old's Brain'  or 'Human Being' for that matter. 

Wikipedia is followed by  an afternoon of sipping tea, reading Jazz Quotes and weaving my way through youtube for inspiration. 

Why I THINK Preschoolers Will Understand Jazz... 

It's playful.  It  builds, soars, repeats, swerves.  It's unexpected.   It's improvosational.   It's collaborative.

Circle Time 1:   

We begin with an idea.  Music has rules.  Fast or slow, high or low.  It picks a rule and sticks with it.  

I sing 'Old MacDonald Had a Farm",  it's familiar and a favorite amongst the kids, a song they all mastered in toddler-hood.    It's steady, like a heartbeat.    It's established fairly quickly that this is a song we all know the rules to.   We are authorities on 'Old MacDonald.' 

Then I present an idea...

'Jazz knows all the rules.  But jazz is playful.  It skips. It hops, it swerves... it bops and beeps, and scats and sweeps.  Jazz musicians play together to turn a familiar something into a something new." 

Then we listen to Ella's version...

Oh my goodness.  The eyes, how they widened.  

I note the tempo changes, the shifts in pitch, and shifting melodic patterns.  I put out the word 'scatting' when Ella does her thing. 

I notice some of the kids instinctually bopping their heads, swinging their shoulders, making sense of shifting swinging tempo with their body, feeling this whole jazz thing out.  

Book -  Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop by Chris Raschka 

I've heard that it's recommended that you read this book in the style of 'A Night In Tunisia' 

Which I always thought was sort of vague in terms of instruction.    I heard a great retelling at a Jazz Young Children workshop, and built my own version from there.  Here's an example:

The keys words are 'collaboration' and 'playfulness'  haha.   Inadvertent collaboration with iphoto lead to my ramblings getting cut short, which is probably for the best.  I've been known to talk.  And we want to get to the...

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES: 

BeBop Hopscotch

The idea is that each of these pictures represents a bebop sound.  

Copied from the book 'Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop', and taped onto the floor. 

We've read the book in class, and it's a literary extension that ties in kinesthetic learning with the visual and auditory.   Plus, the idea of a symbol representing a sound can only be helpful later on next year when alphabet letters are more formally introduced. 

It's also a really nifty way of playing with sound.   

These are the instructions: 

When your foot touches the picture you make that sound. 

Most kids went straight through the path.   Repeating the cadence of the story.  

A few kids notice the path turned, and was mirrored on the other side.  So they  kept going round and round.   The second path didn't follow the progression of the story but was rather randomly placed.  So that really kept us on our toes. 

Two kids really got into it and spent the entirety of playtime here.  Once the crowd thinned to just the two of them, we witnessed them collaborate some innovative techniques...

Forwards then backwards.   Forwards and backwards.  Skipping pictures to get to preferred sounds.   

These two kids later independently scatted heir way through potty time.

"overshoes, overshoes skit skat skiddle skee poopity poopity poop poop pee!" 

Bathroom humor taken to a whole new level.  Maybe it makes a certain amount of sense.   After all: scat is scat, but having spent a fair amount of my childhood in Texas I know that scat is also animal scat.   

Makeshift Musical Playground 

ON THE RUG:

Two REAL acoustic guitars.   They were so big some of the kids ended up standing them up and using them like basses.   Others laid them down flat on the ground, plucked the strings, and placed their head to feel the vibrations.  

Basket O' Kazoos - toilet paper tubes with wax paper covered one end, secured with a rubber band (one for each child labeled with their name).

AT THE TABLES:

I used painters tape to section off table into four sections:

Frame Guitars:  wooden ikea frames, with rubberbands stretched across, ready for plucking.

Box Basses:  Shoeboxes, with rubberbands, makes a much deeper low down sound. 

2 Drum sets - overturned mini metal mixing bowl,  baby food jars, baby formula jars,  paintbrushes, 

There was still a bit of space so I made a make-shift piano, using an illustration from 'Charlie Parker Plays Bebop'  as well as tape for the keys.  

Percussion Center (Inside): 

An overturned table.  Some string.  And a lot of spare keys (I had picked up an entire shoebox of keys from a garage sale for 50 cents).

Tie string to table legs, so it stretches across the length of the table.  Thread on keys.  Tie the other side. 

We provided rhythm sticks,  chopsticks, and paintbrushes.   Any part of the table was open game.   It was interesting to note all the different sounds our lunch table could make depending on where we hit it and what we hit it with.  Once the area cleared out a bit,  there was some experimentations with swinging the string round and round and round, it whirred and jingled and was really mesmerizing to watch. 

Ideas for next time:  maybe secure disposable pie tins to the legs of the table.  Add in a few other 'found' metal objects to string.  I'm starting a collection of anything I think would make an interesting sound.

Percussion Center (Outside): 

Overturned buckets, and big tubs.  We're also lucky enough to have a metal gate, so we put that to use. We basically turned the entire play yard into a musical instrument.   

Circle Time 2:  Three Jazzy Pigs

I had picked up the CD 'Jazzy Fairytales'  at the NAEYC conference, after attending a workshop presented  by Jazz For Young Children.

My go-to is the Three Jazzy Pigs 

I'm fond of the fact that once again, it's a familiar story that the children have mastered, and the jazz elements are used to turn the familiar into something brand new.   

I use the CD, my own voice, and props (little pig figurines, a wolf puppet).  

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES:

Three Jazzy Pigs Clay Table

Set up is simple.  Slabs for each child, a good heaping helping of clay.  Jazz CD in the background (I usually go with a Charlie Parker/Charles Mingus/Wes Montgomery mix).  

Then a scattering of sticks (twigs and popsicle sticks), pig figurines, red lego bricks, and the all important hammers.  

This is an activity I have available before circle time and afterwards.  The fun bit about setting it up before is watching the children discover how the props turn into a story.  Like pieces to a puzzle.   First it's just all about the clay, then eventually I heard a little voice say...

"The Big Bad Wolf can't knock my house down!'

And the play around the table just clicks.   Later, there's a question...

"But where's that big bad wolf???"

And at circle time, when I open up the prop box, and pull out that wolf... there's an exclamation from one of the kids from the clay table... 

"Oh there he is!" 

Science - Block Exploration 

Set-up is a variety of bricks (I got mine from Home Depot, ended up spending about $8).  

Inside the classroom I set up on our large rectangular table.   There were individual bamboo mats for each brick. Along with: 

• small dishes of water
• watercolor paintbrushes
• small dishes of chalk  

In true improvisational collaborative style, the children completed this experience for themselves by filling in my basic set-up.

• In one of my groups children brought over scissors and yarn.
• In another group, a child pressed two bricks together and after a glue stick failed her, brought back clay from the other table to adhere both bricks together. 

Outside the classroom, I set up a large tarp, with bricks and shallow dishes of tempera paint along with fat paintbrushes.  

Here is an excerpt from our newsletter about the experience: 

Science Area...

What sound does a brick make?  You may think no sound at all, but our friends have discovered that simply is not the case.  When you sweep your paintbrush across a brick it makes a sound like schwww, so soft and quiet like a whisper.   And when you hit a block with a popsicle stick it sounds like Ttt! And when you pick up a brick using your big strong muscles, then put it back dow on the table again it makes a very big sound like bppt!

What does a brick look like?   You may think they look like fat red rectangles.  But our friends now know that is not true at all.  They discovered there are bricks that are big bumpy gray squares with a hole where the middle should be (cinder blocks), there are long creamy bricks made out of dusty clay that have divots and cracks and craters, and yes there are red bricks too -- but they are skinny and fat and red and speckled and long and curvy, and one even has tiny holes that happen to be perfect for hiding yarn.  Not only that, but our friends also discovered that bricks change color when you pour water onto them.  They soak that water up and turn darker shades of whatever they were before. 

How does a brick feel? You may think cold and a bit rough.  But our friends understand that bricks can be warmed in the sun or cooled in the shade.  Some bricks are scratchy and bumpy, others so very smooth.  They also know for certain that as soon as you add paint to a brick they it turns slippery-slidey and is oh so very difficult to hold onto.