It is in our sensory experience of the world and of ourselves, in our movements, emotions, interactions, relationships, the environment around us, our memories, and our thoughts. Our approach to music engagement facilitation supports and expands children’s music engagement in whatever form they choose to explore it within their settings: it can include movement, sensory learning, cause-effect activities, playful interactions, or freely exploring instruments and their voices.

The many things music can be are reflected in the multiple ways it affects us: it can touch on how we make sense of the world around us, regulate our emotions, make relationships, and how we plan, experience and understand our actions. This is particularly important to us when we support and extend the interests, needs and wants children express when they play with us. We ask ourselves: in what way is this music engagement working for them? What are they getting out of it? The answers to these questions are endless… ranging from feeling calm(er), feeling better about themselves, making new play partners, learning about causes and effects, developing creativity and imagination – or simply the joy of being themselves as exuberantly as they want.

Knowing this, we often remind our partners (and ourselves), that the development of conventional technical music skills, as wonderfully rewarding as it can be, might, or might not, be what makes music engagement enticing, meaningful and transformational for a child.

Seeing music as much more than ‘playing and listening’ means that the engagement we facilitate looks very different in every child, or group of children, and across different settings. It can happen flexibly at different times and places, and relate in different ways to daily care, learning, or communication activities. In practice, we do not necessarily avoid conventional practitioner-led pre-structured activities, but we see them as an option among many. They are not as an expectation, or a model of what music engagement in an Early Years setting should always look like. The children have always shown us the way, and will continue to do so. They know what they like, and we feel privileged every time they share their imaginative worlds with us.