'My daughter has regular one-to-one music sessions. The tutor is really experienced and is also an ex-primary school teacher. She has a particular interest in teaching students with additional needs. The lessons are funded by a short breaks grant that you can use for respite or for activities. We've been doing them for over a year.
We would go to the teacher's house every week – it was always a little highlight. If perhaps the day had not gone well at school it really helped. The teacher is really intuitive and as she gets to know my daughter – which takes quite a long time, and is still ongoing – she is learning to read her mood. The lessons allow my daughter to be the ‘leader’ and make choices. There is a lot of emphasis on singing. If my daughter is finding it hard to focus or gets restless, the teacher introduces movement – we get up and sing and do some actions with scarves, which she always loves, or throw a ball. It's really varied; the teacher has a lot of tricks in the bag and different things to try.
Before lockdown, the lessons took place at the teacher's house. She got wise to the fact that there were certain things she had to put away! She has this bowl of wooden eggs that my daughter absolutely loves. The teacher makes songs up about the eggs, singing ‘Oh, that's the heavy one, that's the light one’. We once videoed a seven-minute song about those eggs! The teacher draws on the Kodály method.
The lessons feature a lot of instruments, including a marimba and a metallophone, which my daughter is particularly fond of. The teacher has an interest in music therapy, and self-expression is an important part of the lessons, as is speech therapy – she does lots of things with syllables, clapping and so on.
It wasn't always smooth – sometimes we'd say ‘that was tough going’! We'd never have that sort of conversation in front of my daughter but there'd be the odd email.' But over the weeks and months there were some great moments, moments where I thought ‘woah, you've got that now’.
It's really hard to recreate all this at home, especially the spontaneity. We tried two or three sessions on Zoom. The first one went brilliantly because it was a novelty, but after that it didn't really work. I think it was the lack of freedom and also the fact that my daughter is in her own room at home; she couldn't understand why she was having the lesson there. She struggled to concentrate surrounded by her own things.
My daughter would regularly wander off and I wouldn't be able to get her back. The teacher and I can't work as a team to keep her on track like we could if we were in the same room. Also, because my daughter would be moving around, the teacher often couldn't see what she was doing. She couldn't be as intuitive. My daughter definitely couldn't connect to the music in the same way. We tried one of the exact same activities we had done in the room with the teacher, a listening thing – ‘I'm going behind that wall and you tell me what instrument it is’. My daughter just couldn't do it – the sound wasn't as clear and the hiding part doesn't come across on screen.
I'm good at remembering the songs and we do sing, and we've recently been doing clapping games. But I get stuck – if we were in the room with the teacher she'd be taking it somewhere else and it would just develop more.
I can't play piano or guitar. When my daughter played the marimba, the teacher would play chords and nice things under it – I can't do that. I know there are online music things out there for children with extra needs but she isn't keen on the screen so why struggle and try to make her sit in front of it? If she won't engage on screen she can't really access it. It's a shame, it's there and yet we can't do it. It does feel like a loss.'
