Customer Testimonials
I work at a private daycare in Turku, Finland, with a group of 3-5 year olds. I want to provide the children with musical joy and experiences without any pressure.
After training, the method found its way naturally into my own work. In our morning circles, for instance, I use the songs The Sun, Clouds and the Sun, and Raindrops, as we look at the weather outside. This is the high point of the morning circle for many children. In the morning circle, we often meet the “hedgehog” and we draw as many spikes as there are children present.
It has been wonderful to notice how excited the children are and how they calm down and concentrate on the songdrawing activity.
I have found the possibilities for using this method to be almost endless, when you as an adult have the courage to throw yourself into the moment.
As an early childhood music teacher, I work a lot with family groups. One of my essential objects is to support the interaction between children and adults through music, and I hope they can use the musical ideas provided by me in their everyday life and at home.
For me and my families, songdrawing is much more than just practising pen use and following drawings. We often draw shapes in their air with our hands, rhythm sticks and mallets, or move around the room creating shapes. We can draw the songs with fingers, balls, or paintbrishes on various parts of the body, or in the air with scarves or ribbons.
We have experiences some wonderful moments when the parents have acted as “song boards” and the children have drawn on them!
I have a Master’s degree in Education, am a class teacher and a drama pedagogue. I have worked as a class teacher for 8 years. I learned about the Songdrawing Method three years ago and it has become an important method that I use in my class at least once a week. I have noticed that songdrawing suits pupils of all ages and also functions well in a group of pupils of various ages.
As the national curriculum develops, the boundaries between different subjects become blurred and learning becomes integrated. Songdrawing fits well into this philosophy – I use the method in music, art, english, and science classes.
In my experience, songdrawing also supports the development of speech production. For a child who finds it difficult to produce speech sounds, drawing works as support for the child’s spoken expression, both sung, told and rhymed.
We work in early education with pre-school children and together we took the basic and advanced courses on songdrawing. We found the method truly inspiring and started to try it out with the children. It was important that we could participate in the courses together as colleagues, which made it easier to apply the method in our everyday activities.
The more we have used the method, the more it has become a part of our everyday life. The children now make their own suggestions about songs and rhymes to be drawn. It’s great that this activity can also be participated by children who find it difficult to participate in other shared activities and express themselves. With these children, experiences of success with the method are particularly common, as there is no ‘correct end result’.
There is magic in songdrawing – the children concentrate on drawing, and the hustle and bustle is gone.
I’m a speech therapist working as a private practitioner. My clients are mainly children and young people with severe development disabilities and autism spectrum disorders. I also work with various language and speech disorders. I use the method as a tool when working with individual children and groups. Songdrawing has provided me with new views on therapy work even in surprising situations. The method has got me interested in the connections between music, language and the brain, a subject which was not familiar to me before.
I feel that songdrawing is an excellent additional method to be used in occupational therapy. It helps children to become interested in and inspired by movement, drawing, rhythm and song. I completed the basics training in 2014. The training had wonderful songs and exercises which felt really captivating.