Musical Storytimes
Pied Piper Projects began delivering the Musical Storytimes Project in 2005, as part of the NYMAZ programme of activity throughout North Yorkshire. This project was very collaborative from the outset, with Live Music Now providing the musicians for the project and North Yorkshire County Council's Library & Information Service providing participants, support and venues for over 120 workshops per year.
This project uses a favourite books as a great starting point for fun musical activities for under 5s. The aims of the project are twofold:
- to introduce children to a range of musical instruments and styles and to provide them with opportunities to express themselves creatively through music, thus building their confidence, coordination, communication and listening skills
- to encourage children, parents and carers to access their local library for fun, educational activities and to use this as a way of building and strengthening links between the library and the local community.
The project provided early years and pre-school settings from across the whole of North Yorkshire with the opportunity to attend a series of Musical Storytimes sessions in one of twenty different libraries. Six different artists and ensembles each delivered twenty 30-minute sessions in ten different libraries, aimed at groups of up to fifteen children aged between 3 and 5 years.
"A new experience for my child and he listened and joined in with the story and music. he talked about his experience to friend and family afterwards and I feel these sessions had a great impact on him." - Parent
Each session was based around a book selected from a list supplied by the library service and the musicians worked closely with library staff to create their own interpretations of the selected books. Some chose to set the books to original scores incorporating fun musical games and opportunities for the children to join in, others used the themes in the books to create musical journeys involving jungles and runaway trains.
All the musicians involved in the project were members of Live Music Now, and Pied Piper worked closely with them to ensure that the musicians received specific training relating to this project to ensure that there was a unified approach to delivery. However, the artistic content of each workshop was up the musicians, and as a result children participated in a varied, creative and engaging programme of activities.
In addition to providing training to enable the musicians to deliver effective workshops, Pied Piper also provided CPD activities for early years and library staff after each series of workshops. These full day sessions were again delivered in conjunction with LMN, and explored simple musical ideas using voices, basic rhythm and percussion activities which could be used by staff on a daily basis. Sessions also explored the links to literacy through music, and by the end of each day staff had the basic skills, knowledge and confidence to create their own basic musical storytime activity with their children.
The strong partnership with the Library Service has been vital to the success of the project and has enabled the development of the initial idea into an effective and engaging programme of work for the whole county.