Early childhood music classes can be utterly delightful, utterly musical, and truly satisfying for teacher, children, and parents—at all levels of development. Creating effective lesson plans and using effective techniques can make teaching seem effortless. There are those times, however, when things don’t go quite as we might like, and we get discouraged. We may need to develop yet another kind of technique—that of handling ourselves!  

Too often, we feel that our success lies in children’s “happy, clappy” response, and we’ll do anything to attain such. We might become overly enthusiastic; try too hard to convince parents; play into how cute the children are, or compromise our musical values for things we know “the children love.”  The more aware we are of our own needs, the more we can put the highest priority on meeting the musical needs of the children, and the more we discover that “children love” what is highly musical.

A teacher’s ego is fragile. We try to get children to interact musically, and when they don’t, we feel we are a failure. When they do, we feel validated as a good teacher. We can be in such a hurry to get musical response, making us feel like good teachers, that we engage with interactivity before the children are musically ready.  There will always be a child or two who are sufficiently outgoing that they would engage with us in Rhythm Dialogue or Resting Tone Activities in the first or second encounter, but are they musically ready? Has there been sufficient input for meaningful output? Are we feeding their musicality, or are they feeding our egos? Might their willing response intimidate others who are not at all willing to musically respond?  We sometimes have to temper our own needs and reassess what we are doing.

If you are planning appropriately for music learning, using curriculum materials that feed the process of music learning, and employing techniques that facilitate the process of music learning, you will be engaging children in highly musical and truly delightful classes. If you get discouraged, remember all of the things that you are doing right.  Don’t forget what an accomplishment it is just to get a group of very young children to all attend to something for any length of time. Remember the happy faces that come into successive classes, and the spontaneous hugs you might receive on a regular basis. Remember how successful this or that activity was, before the class fell apart. Remember how many parents are happy with your program, pay money for it and bother to bring their children, despite the one who complained.

You know enough about what you are doing to assess energy management and re-order activities to better propel children through the class. You know enough about techniques to question the execution of a particular activity. You can set up your lesson plan to explore a new activity prior to an anchor, Play Song, or activity you know will work well, so if the new activity “doesn’t work” with the techniques you chose to use, you can fall back into the anchor, Play Song, or dependable activity to pick up the energy. You can end an activity that isn’t working by doing fewer verses, or extend the activity into more verses to more fully capture the musical mind, or engage differently with the content than you had intended.

Re-play the class in your mind to pinpoint the problems. Think back to activities that have worked well—not just the “happy, clappy,” but those that held the children spellbound, those that drew the deer-in-the-headlights stares, those that engaged children musically. Build on those. Design activities with those that have been successful as your model. Plan successive activities to be like those that have worked successively before.  

If the entire class session does not go smoothly, it might be time to reassess the type of lesson plan, or template, you are using. Perhaps you are still delivering a class for beginners, when the children are ready for interactivity. Perhaps you are trying for too much interactivity, when the children are just beginners. Perhaps the children have been in preschool for a year and a half and are ready for interactivity, whether or not they are ready musically.

If we are doing our job, meeting the musical needs of young children, we will always be encountering an occasional roadblock, where we have to make new decisions and go new directions. This is simply part of the process.  We work with babies for a year and then we have the most developed toddlers we’ve ever had. Now what do we do with them? Down the road they become the most developed three year olds we’ve ever had.  Now what do we do with them? Then they become the most developed four year olds we’ve ever had.  They are incredibly musical, yet still not even in kindergarten.  Now what are we going to do with them?

Children’s growth propels us to grow, to find new dimensions of children’s artistry, new capabilities of various ages and stages, and more “grown up” activities, even at ages 2 and 3.  It gives us the opportunity to explore various aspects of music learning as we try things to determine what these children are ready for.  More Art Songs? More Gem Songs? More difficult musical content? New props? Fewer props? Longer activities? More imaginative activities? Rhythm and Tonal Syllables? Something we have never tried before? As we ride the waves of turbulent classes, informed by the process of music learning and curriculum materials that serve that process, we learn more about music learning, about teaching technique, about lesson planning, and about what good teachers we are.