A sound landscape
When designing a setting for our children to engage in, when they are discovering the wonderment of sound, it is important to consider what is the purpose behind this – what as a teacher, are you wishing to discover and to learn about from the children’s engagement.
With this in mind we carefully created a sound landscape for our toddler group to encounter. This consisted of the proposal of two very different possibilities being on offer – one that consisted of plastic resources of various shape and size, whilst the other reflected a selection of harder more robust resources comprising of metal.
Our children were invited to engage with these various possibilities and they delighted in a wide variety of techniques as they researched the concept of sound. Some discovered the crispness and clarity of the metal objects when knocked against the floor or when tapped with another metal item – others enjoyed the scratchy sound as they rubbed their fingers carefully over the bubble wrap – others enjoyed the combination of using a metal object in conjunction with something made of plastic therefore creating their own unique sound.
Giving our children the time to freely engage with such learning experiences leaves the door open for such a richness of learning as they build knowledge from their own hands on experimentation, but also by watching and learning from each other.
