One of the first composing activities I use with very young composers is to give them an Inspiration Card. These are brightly-hued cards with some sort of brightly-hued swirl of an image intended to inspire brightly-hued, fantastical musical ideas to come flooding from their brains to the instruments they’re holding.

There are composing brainwaves on the back for those with none, or for teachers to sift delicately into the waiting brains and ears.

The young composers can make their own Inspiration Cards too, as a follow-up activity.

The next stage of this inspirational composing activity is to combine several Inspiration Cards together to make longer pieces of music.

Maybe the music inspired by them could happen at the same time, or one after the other.

Maybe some cards can be repeated and others only appear once.

The possibilities are miraculous!

The templates and suggestions for my Inspiration Cards are available in my “Composing In The Classroom” book, available here http://sounz.org.nz/resources/show/167 or contact me if you’re not in New Zealand!

One way in which I developed this idea was to incorporate it into a Music/ICT cross-curricular unit with 5-6 year olds exploring long and short sounds. Here are the things they felt they had learned during the unit, and they in turn tell you what happened:

• We made lots of long and short sounds with our voices.
• We made a picture of our ideas using lines and shapes and by spelling our sounds.
• When we want a sound to get quieter and quieter, we make the shapes smaller and smaller.
• We found out that there are special shapes for long and short sounds in music.
• We played our voice music picture on the instruments.
• We found that we can use ICT to create music pictures. We used “Paint”.
• We used the pen and  brush tools to draw lines for our long sounds.
• We made circles and other shapes for shorter sounds.
• We filled the background and our shapes using the paint pot.
• We changed the colours of our lines and shapes.
• We used the text tool to spell our voice sounds.
• We used the font  “maestro” to put the special music signs in our pictures.
• We found which letters we need to press to get the different music signs.
• We saved our pictures as “My name music”.
• When our pictures were printed, we played them on the instruments.
• We performed our pictures to each other.