When I began teaching full time, I don’t remember writing so many songs or poems about my own experiences. Perhaps I was busy; perhaps I was happier; or perhaps I just don’t remember. Instead, more and more, I used to sing songs to and with the children.  Spending time with Jenny at her nursery school, I had learned lots of activity songs that the children liked to join in.  As time went on I learned more from other teachers and started to make up my own; it seemed a good way to help the children enjoy learning.

One thing I found when I was teaching young children was that they usually enjoy music and singing.  They like to join in with class songs or clap along; they like to tap a triangle or shake a tambourine. When children start to lose concentration on what you are saying, a good way to get their attention back is to clap a rhythm or to sing a song.  I learned to get quite good at making up songs off the top of my head or singing the ones that the children liked.

I started to make up songs to go with what we were doing in the classroom: counting and alphabet songs, songs about vegetables, autumn, bonfire night or harvest: whatever the children were learning about. The children enjoyed singing the songs and clapping along with the beat.

Once children have learned a song, they often like to sing it over and over again, perhaps because it has become familiar and they like to do the actions.  Five year olds don’t say, “That’s not a proper song”.  They just join in and sing.

I would make up songs for the children as I worked in the garden, as I drove the car, as I rode my bicycle, as I walked in the country.  The songs seemed to come as I was ‘doing my planning’ in my head – not at a desk or a computer, but while I was doing some activity.

I loved making up simple songs to help the children learn about numbers:

“One is odd and two is even, three is odd and four is even…”
“One pair of socks, that’s two socks; two pairs of socks, that’s four socks…..”

Songs where children can join in with the actions are the best, so that they are all involved in the class activity.  I also love the songs that give children (and me!) a bit of exercise at the beginning of the day, a sort of warm up:

“Running on the spot, running on the spot,
One, two, three, four, running on the spot…”

In my last few years of full time teaching the job began to change, with more targets, more intricate planning and lots more paperwork. It was harder to find time for the “fun” things, like making up class poems and songs and singing them together. There was a lot of planning, assessing and teaching to a narrower and more prescribed curriculum.  There was, and still is, a great deal of pressure on schools to get children to achieve higher and higher targets, so that the school would perform well enough in the ‘league tables’.

As pressure fell on teachers it was hard not to put pressure on to the children to encourage them to do well in their tests.  But I was sure that it was important for children to have fun in their learning and to praise and encourage them for their achievements, so that they could learn to have confidence in their own worth and abilities. I put my creative energies into planning interesting ‘fun’ lessons and thinking up exciting activities that would help the children to learn.  I still sang songs with the children, but, with all the pressure, there seemed to be less time for singing.

There was less time for fun in the classroom, though we still sang songs and action rhymes. There was less time for fun in the rest of my life when Sharon became ill. There was no room for songs then, although we did our best to pretend that everything was normal.

Then Sharon died and the only songs I wanted were the ones she had chosen, the ones she had loved, and they just made me cry.  No songs seemed to express the sadness and desolation of that time, but I listened to the radio and cried with the sad songs.  Everything was dark, drab and hopeless, a grey limbo, with no music in it.

At first the idea of writing songs never entered my head.  The idea that music therapy could help me seemed strange and unlikely.  But then I went to Bob and I made up that first song: the lament for Sharon.