Early Childhood Column General Music Today

Volume 22 Number 3
April 2009 25-28
© 2009 MENC: The National

Literacy and Art in the Music Class

Association for Music Education
10.1177/1048371309333207

Young Children Read and Draw What They Sing

Susan Kenney

S everal years ago, I had the opportunity to visit music

preschools and elementary music schools in Moscow,
Russia. The music education these children received
was broad, deep, demanding, and joyful. What a thrill to
see how musical children are when they have quality music
experiences every day. The culture in which these programs
exist is so different from our own, that to adopt or imitate
their education system would not be possible or even desir-
able for us in the United States. But some of the practices I
observed might enhance our own music teaching. One of
my greatest delights was looking through children’s portfo-
lios of pictures they had made of every song they had sung
that year. In place of a list of “Songs We Know,” these
­children had each made a picture of every song. Shown on
this page are details from some of their pictures.

Creating an Art/Music Gallery

Building on this idea, first- and second-grade teachers at

Lincoln Elementary School in Salt Lake City, Utah, began
a project to provide time for children to illustrate songs
they learned in music class. After learning a song, we stud-
ied an art masterpiece that illustrated the same subject. For
example, after singing “Down by the Station,” we looked
at Claude Monet’s painting Gare Saint-Lazare, which was
then displayed the print in our classroom art gallery.
After learning the song “Clap Your Hands,” we looked
at Van Gogh’s painting, Two Hands. We studied our own
hands and the hands of babies and grandmas to see what
was alike and different. The songs “Trot, Trot, Trot” and
“High Stepping Horses” prepared us to study the colorful
A Little Hunchbacked Horse by Borunov. We discussed the
way the painter curved the necks of the horses and drew the
feet so it looked like they were dancing. We also discussed
the artist’s use of color and shape and what the piper might
be playing to encourage the horses to step so high. “One,
Two, Three, Four, Five, Once I Caught a Fish Alive” led to
an exploration of Matisse’s Still Life with Goldfish. We

Susan Kenney is an associate professor of music education at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. E-mail: susan_kenney@byu.edu.

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26   General Music Today

Gare Saint-Lazare by Claude Monet (1877)

Two Hands by Vincent Van Gogh (1885)

A Little Hunchbacked Horse by N. Borunov (1971)

compared the colors used in Matisse’s painting with those

used by Borunov. The librarian helped us find art master-
pieces, and we used songs and paintings from Go In and
Out the Window (Marks, 1987) and Songs of the Wild West
(Axelrod, 1991), both illustrated with pictures from the
New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
We discussed the fact that music can express an idea
using melodies and rhythms and that paintings can express
a similar idea using colors and shapes. As a class, we deter-
mined that since we are musicians, as evidenced by our
singing, we are also artists. Thus we began to draw, color,
or paint our own ideas of the words in our songs. Sometimes
we brought in real-world objects. For example, some of the
children wanted to draw a picture to go with the song
“Snail, Snail,” but did not know how. So we brought in a
snail and noticed that the shell spiraled into a circle. With
that observation, the children easily made a shell. But they
could not figure how to make the snail itself. So we watched
the snail come out of the shell and saw it looked like a fat
worm with antlers on its head. It was easy for the children
to add the fat worm to the shell, and they were proud to
display their art with the other artwork in the room. Still Life with Goldfish by Henri Matisse (1911)
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 Kenney / Literacy and Art in the Music Class   27  

Pictured here are examples of the children’s art. After

drawing his round snail, Ethan added sky and ground to his
picture. Ashley’s drawing represents the song “Little
Johnny Brown, Lay Your Comfort Down,” and Liam shows
his idea for the song “We Are Dancing in the Forest While
the Wolf Is Far Away.”
Soon the classroom boards were filled with pictures that
represented the songs we had sung. The children enjoyed
“singing” the artwork and could be heard singing as they
did other work throughout the day. The classroom teacher
was delighted that we had helped children understand the
meanings of words through art, and I was thrilled that the Snail, Snail by Ethan Poole
children were mastering great folk song literature.

Illustrated Books

Another idea that grew from my Moscow experience

was that of making singing books for the book basket.
Rather than creating one picture per song as described
above, the children were given blank books (an 8½ ×
11–inch paper folded into 8 rectangles) in which they
made a picture for each phrase of the song. In addi-
tion, the words of the song were printed in the book, so
they could “read” each phrase after making a picture.
When each book was completed, it was placed in the
book basket, where all the children had opportunity to
select a songbook to sing/read during free-play time.
Children who had trouble reading had success with the
book because they already knew the words to the song.
Others enjoyed the challenge of drawing pictures to the
phrases, and older children could write the words under Johnny Brown by Ashley Holker
the pictures. The classroom teachers were delighted to
have another way for children to practice reading, and I
was happy that the children were learning the folk-song
literature and becoming more aware of phrases. Not only
that, many were singing alone as they chose to sing the
books during free-play time.
Children in older grades were invited to make picture
song books for the very young children. They went into
the kindergarten and preschool classes and sang their
books, then presented them as gifts to the class. The
older children seemed empowered by this activity, and
they had meaningful experiences singing alone to the
young children.
On the next page is an example of the pages from one
of the singing books. Each book is 41/4 × 21/8 inches. The
tiny books seemed to delight the children, and they loved
reading/singing not only their own books but other chil-
dren’s creations as well. We Are Dancing in the Forest by Liam Stracham

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28   General Music Today
References
Axelrod, A. (1991). Songs of the Wild West. NY: Metropolitan
Museum of Art and Simon & Schuster.
Bernard, B. (Ed.). (1985). Vincent by Himself: A selection of Van
Gogh’s paintings and drawings together with extracts from his
letters. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Bonfante-Warren, A. (2000). The Musee D’Orsay. Westport, CO:
Hugh Lauter Levin Associates.
Downloaded from http://gmt.sagepub.com by Pro Quest on March 3, 2010
Brodsky, B. (1980). The art treasures from Moscow museums.
Moscow: Izobrazitelnoye Iskusstvo.
Kotov, V., & Taktashova, L. (1990). The Palekh: The State Museum
of Palekh art. Moscow: Izobrazitelnoye Iskusstvo.
Marks, C. (1987). Go in and out the window: An illustrated songbook
for young people. NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Henry
Holt & Company.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.