Music corner

Music One2One: Music with under two-year-olds The one-to-one project is developing effective ways of working in music with parents and their young children. In the next six Music Corners I will outline activities developed in the project. This week the emphasis is on listening, using carefully selected everyday items - remember one saucepan may have a pleasing sound, another a dull thud - and presenting items in a way that focuses children's listening attention.

Crinkling foil

* Set out big barbecue foil tins on a floor covered with a soft rubber gym mat and suspend lengths of tin foil above the mat from a tall frame.

* Sitting babies and crawlers can bang, rustle, crinkle and crumple the foil. The shininess of the foil is an important part of the experience too.

Clinking cutlery

* Suspend spoons individually from string and attach to a line stretched across the room. Include tiny teaspoons to big serving spoons.

* Ensure the lengths of the strings will allow the spoons to chink together and are at a suitable height for the sitting babies to play with.

Ringing bells

* Place wind-up alarm clocks with ringing bells on top in shoeboxes.

* We set them to ring when the children came in from outdoors. The children explored the contents and quickly learned how to stop and start the ringing mechanism.

* We also placed a board with five bicycle bells with different tones against a wall. Sitting babies quickly found out how to ring the bells.

Music One2One is funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and Youth Music