When Rachel Salem took the helm as Chapin’s newest Lower School (LS) Music Teacher, she brought with her an infectious enthusiasm and passion for her craft. As she got to know her new students, she was impressed with the joy and curiosity each Lower School grade brought to their music classes.
A deep love of and appreciation for music is the undercurrent of everything Ms. Salem brings to her classroom. Even with challenging musical tasks, like singing a complex rhythmic song in a round with accompanying movements, her students are ready and approach it with determined playfulness.
Ms. Salem intentionally creates an environment in which the girls feel comfortable trying new things — which they do every class — even when they are bound to make mistakes. In Class 2, for example, they like to dance and sing a silly little song about chocolate chip cookies and oreos, singing, “yum, yum, yum!” Ms. Salem uses this fun and familiar warm-up to introduce new musical concepts. One day, they removed one word from each round of the song and practiced holding a rest where the words would have been. The girls loved this game even when they never successfully completed the challenge.
While the LS students have plenty of fun in their music classes, Ms. Salem is carefully building their musical repertoire and skills. Her goal is to send them off to Class 4 with a solid foundation for music literacy and a love for music. Ms. Salem introduces them to a wide range of instruments so if they desire to pick up a more serious study of one as they grow, they feel confident doing so. They also develop a familiarity with sheet music, musical notation, and rhythm, singing in a group, singing with accuracy, and defining their singing voices as different from talking voices.
Collaboration and group dynamics are a large part of the girls’ musical education, as well. Through group activities and choir performances, Kindergarten-Class 3 students learn new ways to express and regulate themselves in social settings. Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is integrated into the Chapin music program and a quintessential part of every class. Not only does music provide an outlet for individual expression, but Ms. Salem helps her students develop new tools for navigating intricate social dynamics.
Class 2’s collaborative song-writing is a great example of this work in action. In recent music classes, the students were tasked with creating new lyrics for their Winter Play, a tale about mishaps during a school trip to the zoo. To introduce song-writing to the students, Ms. Salem started by asking the girls to describe the scene and think about what emotions the characters would be feeling in that moment. This exercise helps them to develop the ability to tap into their own feelings and connect them to music, and to see how they can empathize with others. Once they had established how the characters would feel, the students began composing and writing lyrics.
In Kindergarten, Ms. Salem is laying the groundwork for her students to accomplish what their older peers have. With these young musicians, she taps into their innate curiosity, encouraging their exploration of instruments and of the physicality of music. She wants them to feel the music in their bodies, because, she says, when they feel it, they can more easily translate that bodily understanding to the mental comprehension needed to build music literacy. They clap, pat, jump, stomp and move in myriad ways in time with the beat and slowly build their ability to recognize these patterns on their own. As they begin to understand rhythm as a concept, Ms. Salem introduces them to instruments and singing in a group.
Along the way, their teacher encourages them to add their own creativity and share their ideas. If the class is tapping out a beat with ribbed rods and one student asks if they can rub them together for a new sound, Ms. Salem encourages her to try it. This self-discovery and enjoyment of the process is at the heart of Chapin’s program. Ms. Salem helps to create an environment of structured artistic discovery for her students; the classroom becomes a landscape for exploration of their own creativity and discovery of new connections between music and the broader world.
These internal connections are mirrored through the interdisciplinary nature of the LS music program. Often, the work created in these classes is tied closely with other performing arts, like drama and dance, but the overlap with academic studies is just as strong. Singing songs in other languages, especially Spanish, which is taught from K-12 at Chapin, reinforces their language skills. They tie in lessons from social studies by learning about other cultures through the exploration of western and non-western music and musical notation. Each new song they learn helps strengthen their reading and comprehension, and songwriting further develops their writing abilities. Even breathing exercises, often done using fun props like colorful scarves, tie back to their body awareness and help boost lessons learned in P.E.
Ms. Salem’s passion and enthusiasm for music washes over the girls as they learn and boosts their confidence and joy in their classroom and on the stage. They also recognize early that they can make connections to any of their interests through music throughout their time at Chapin.
