Songwriting with your primary class

Music, education, and child development go hand in hand. This is not news. These are all well-documented connections and something music teachers have known for a long time. Music is everywhere, in almost every aspect of a person's life. Children love to sing. Many primary schools have amazing singing cultures that nurture and develop the pupil's love of singing.

And yet by the time a child reaches their early teens, few retain that passion. They become self-conscious in front of their peers. Everyone has a deeply personal relationship with their voice resulting in singing becoming a vulnerability, particularly for those of us who aren't Justin Bieber or Celine Dion. However, primary school aged children haven't reached that point yet. Most still enjoy singing and will sing in groups, on their own, in class, in assemblies, absolutely everywhere! And yet singing in the classroom to assist learning is still under-utilised.

Learning songs

Using my experience as an ex-head of music, choral conductor, practising musician and composer, I created the company SongBug. Our team delivers singing and song writing workshops in primary schools. We work with children to create bespoke school songs and we have a range of songs on our website streaming service, including ‘learning songs’. Learning songs enable children to learn and recall information about a specific topic. They are a vastly more effective tool for learning than simply memorising information.

Harvard Health says that ‘listening to and performing music reactivates areas of the brain associated with memory, reasoning, emotion, speech and reward’. BBC Culture states: ‘Music has been used as a mnemonic device (a learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval in the human memory) for thousands of years. Music helps because it provides a rhythm and rhyme and sometimes alliteration, which helps to unlock information with cues. It is the structure of the song that helps us remember it, as well as the melody and the images the words provoke.’

For example, eighteen years ago I heard a song being sung in a Year 7 music lesson that had lyrics which described the seven elements of music, set to a variation of the melody from the 1980s Cadbury's Fudge advert: ‘A finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat’. I remember every line of that song to this day.

The SongBug team composed and recorded a song called ‘George Killed the Dragon’, which we taught to KS2 children in a school in Bristol. Within ten minutes of learning that song, the children could recall all the key points of the history of St George: who he was, where and when he lived, what his job was, and so on.

If you are a budding composer you may be able to write a song in the time it took you to read this far, having created a melody from scratch and added lyrics and chords to your masterpiece. If, however, you are a non-specialist in this area, then creating a learning song may seem very daunting. Here are some techniques for a basic song:

• You do not have to create your own melody. Use a simple tune that already exists and that children will know, copyright permitting. The melody to Frère Jacques is a good one to use as it has repetition and can be sung in a round, which will further assist in information retention.
• Take the main points of information that you want the children to memorise and put them into short and concise bullet points.
• Determine the number of syllables required to fit into your melody and then adjust those bullet points to fit.
• Have a go at making lines rhyme but remember that they really do not need to.
• Try singing it and you will soon instinctively be able to play around with the words and/or the melody until the song sits well.
• Download or stream backing tracks to the melodies you have used. YouTube is full of backing tracks that have no singing in them.
• Have fun with it!

So, let's put this into practice by creating one short verse of a song that will help children remember some facts about the Great Fire of London, following the steps above:

The bits of information that I want to include in the song are:

• The Great Fire of London took place in 1666
• It started in Pudding Lane
• One of the reasons for it was that it had been an exceptionally long, hot, and dry summer
• It took five days for the fire to be put out.

Now I have my bullet points I'm going to choose the melody to the song Incy Wincy Spider. I need to create four lines of lyrics, with lines 1 and 2 rhyming with each other, and the same with lines 3 and 4:

• The Great Fire of London in sixteen sixty-six,
• It started in Pudding Lane and swept through London Bridge,
• The fire burned for five days, they couldn't put it out,
• ‘Cause summer had been hot and dry, and London had a drought.

As you become more experienced with the process you will write increasingly creative songs that will capture your pupils’ imaginations and help their learning.

Identity songs

SongBug also works on writing and recording bespoke school songs (identity songs). We believe that such songs have great purpose and have been overlooked. Such songs elicit a deep sense of pride, collective identity and belonging. This idea is not new. Every country has a national anthem. Every football team has a song. When 30,000 Liverpool FC fans all sing You'll Never Walk Alone it certainly is powerful and moving. We have brought this concept to several schools and those songs have been loved by the pupils and staff, as well as by Ofsted.

The process we follow is, in principle, the same as that which we have already discussed but to a much greater level. We go into schools and work with the children through hands-on creative workshops in which we create lyrics that encapsulate the school's ethos and personality, and we set it to music which is recorded with a full band.

The way we do this varies between schools. With one school in Coventry, we had each year group for 45 minutes throughout the day. We focused primarily on what style of song the children wanted and collectively worked on the lyrics to that song. In another workshop in a school in Bristol we worked with twenty children, selected from all year groups, throughout the entire day and collaboratively wrote the lyrics, melody and chords in full. That school had, in the fortnight prior to our arrival, already worked in their assemblies to decide what key words and phrases they wanted to include in their song.

These projects result in each school having a fully bespoke song of their own and backing tracks with which to learn the song and perform it in assemblies, concerts and in the classroom. If you are a composing specialist then give it a go. I promise you the entire process and end result is extremely rewarding for the whole school.

If you would like the help of SongBug in your school, visit www.songbug.co.uk