Mary Johnston

I am currently working in Australian Primary schools as a Music Education Mentor with classroom teachers to encourage the reintroduction of music, songs and rhythm games into their daily generalist program through Richard Gill's National Music Teacher Mentoring Program (NMTMP) and The Song Room's DUET program.The approach to public education in the Australian context has become increasingly utilitarian and focused on literacy and maths skills. I have come into teaching through a background in experimental science in Physiology and my work has been mainly in the early years (K-2) where language acquisition and teaching reading and writing is the key focus. I was lucky to be taught music in the English education system of the 1970's and I have always included music and singing in my teaching. This led to a career progression into specialist music teaching in primary schools and later to music teacher mentoring. In my mentoring work I have worked with children from disadvantaged backgrounds and also children with learning challenges. I have seen first hand how music and in particular, singing, enhances and supports these student's language development. In both teaching and mentoring, I am seeking to show that the link between language acquisition and singing in young children is causal and not consequential and thus justifies the inclusion of music teaching in their daily classroom routine. I have a large repertoire of tried and tested songs and music from my years working as a classroom music teacher and I am currently working to compile suites of engaging but simple songs that support active listening and the specific phonemic awareness of initial sounds and blending of sounds. Analysis of formative and summative assessment and testing can be used to support the hypothesis that the intentional teaching of music and songs helps to develop a student's decoding and word recognition skills.

special interests

Educational mentor, children's songs/games, language development, phonics, link to music, formative and summative assessment

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