Making music mine: the development of rhythmic literacy

In this study, I explored children's development of rhythmic music literacy using a language acquisition paradigm. An emergent, constructivist curriculum was implemented over one academic year with 39 children, 5-8 years old. Children were involved in audiation-based active listening, singing, moving, chanting, and playing instruments and engaged in musical dialogue through imitation and improvisation. They had rhythm stories read to them, they wrote and read their own. A comprehensive musical development progress log, individual and collective music reading assessments, analysis of children's notated rhythms, and video recordings of children reading their notated music comprised the data set, which was analysed regularly and triangulated for validity. For trustworthiness, early childhood and general music practitioners observed the curriculum in action and reviewed children's notational artefacts. Findings indicated that, as children wrote and read their rhythm stories, they self-corrected when making mistakes - revising their stories upon reading them aloud, giving clues to their formation of musical meaning through the audiation and sound of notated music.