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Blue Cabin’s programme of early years music-making, This is the Place, aims to help care-experienced babies and children build relationships and form attachments. It includes weekly music-making sessions for babies and their foster carers, led by Blue Cabin Associate Artists, Carol Bowden and Katie Doherty. Katie shares her personal experience of leading these sessions in Redcar & Cleveland.
Our music-making sessions have been taking place in Darlington for almost two years and earlier this year we began delivering sessions in Redcar, thanks to funding from Youth Music, Darlington Borough Council, Creative Darlington and Redcar & Cleveland Council.
We started This is The Place in Redcar after Easter this year, in a lovely setting which provides plenty of things to be curious about. Unidentified local bird life provides many a discussion between the grown ups, and passing pups are always an excitement for the little ones too. You might think that these things are a distraction to a music making session, but it’s all part of the joy of it, and my co-facilitator Carol who has an encyclopedic knowledge of songs, often has just the right one to hand about a dinosaur, dog, peacock or flamingo! Music drives our sessions but they are about so much more.
In the beginning, we started with the important things… What are the words to ‘The Wheels on The Bus’ in Redcar? Are they different from the words in Darlington? We learn that they are indeed!
I love stuff like this because it reminds me that the tradition of passing on songs through generations, from ear to mouth, remains and reflects the communities that these songs live in. Songs are brilliant.
The foster carers in Redcar not only bring us their own version of ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ but they teach us whole new verses to songs we have known for our whole lives. Sharing music is connective. Bonds are being formed.
Much like the amazing outdoor space surrounding us, our space is also very much alive. It expands and contracts with children growing, developing, being confident, being shy, being poorly, attending contact, starting nursery or of course, moving on.
The space needs to be stretchy, for all of these things; the expected, the understandable, the unexpected and the surprising too.
Carol and I, and someone from the Virtual School (either the lovely Rachael or her colleague Rachel), arrive each week with the same warm welcome, smile, cushions or chairs, warm or cold drinks, biscuits, puppets, instruments and songs and we wait… for the space to fill with this particular week’s wonders. No two sessions are the same.
In a relatively short space of time in our Redcar space, we have experienced some big moments in the lives of our participants. It is clear that this has quickly become an important space for them. This was recently demonstrated when one of our little ones brought along another member of their family. This sometimes shy and cautious little one was absolutely bursting with pride, desperate to show what happens in this space; how we roar at the dinosaur, how we bounce to the music, how we play our instruments high and low and eat our biscuits and help feed the baby and just how BRILLIANT it all is!
Are you a carer for a care-experienced child in Redcar & Cleveland who’s aged 0 to five years? If you’d like to get involved in our music-making sessions, get in touch! Email Virtual.School@redcar-cleveland.gov.uk to find out more.
Find out how to get involved in our This is the Place sessions in Darlington – if you’re a carer for a care-experienced child in Darlington, aged 0 to five, email Nicola Andrews on Nicola.Andrews@darlington.gov.uk for more details.
We’ve put together some free resources to share how music-making can help development and attachment – including a playlist of songs created by Katie Doherty and Carol Bowden. See the resources here>>
