If you hand a five-year-old an instrument, they won't wait for a lesson—they'll likely just start making sounds. That effortless impulse to create is the starting point for everything we do in music at Gillispie, where elementary students learn a new instrument every year.
This week, our Kindergarteners learned to read the treble clef by composing their own music. Taking a page from Vicky Weber's book, The Song Garden, students wanted to plant flowers in magical soil to create a song garden of their own. They mapped out visual scores by gluing paper flowers onto a staff, carefully matching treble clef lines to the color-coded notes on our Xylophones and Boomwhackers. And the best part? Getting to perform each other's pieces.
As those flower patterns turned into actual songs, their eyes lit up! It was a great reminder of why we start here: learning to read music shouldn't replace a child's drive to create—it should just give them more room to play.