Hi, my name is Sally Wagter, creator of Active Music Digital!

Hello! I’m Sally, the creator of Active Music Digital. I’m a primary teacher with a specialism in music.

I fell in love with singing games when I started going to Kodaly, Dalcroze and Orff courses. I loved the instrinsic satisfaction of a singing game – keeping in time, , singing in canon, changing partners etc and I could see how they had all the ingredients to start to develop children’s musical skills. I began writing lesson plans for my school, then friends started asking for copies, so I began to write them for others and throughout the process I realised that it was becoming harder and harder to explain the games so that people could just ‘get them’. That’s when I started filming them – I wanted other teachers to see the children playing the games so the penny could drop more quickly. This way, I figured more teachers – and therefore children – could access these amazing games and activities more easily.

I spent a happy 10 years researching singing games and musical activities and learning how musical skills develop in small steps (mostly through my Kodaly training). I then started writing them into progressive lesson plans in a way that I felt would be easily accessible to other teachers and tried and tested them again and again on my enthusiastic classes. I’ve used the lesson plans myself in many schools and since Active Music has been available to purchase, so have hundreds of other schools. It’s been an exciting process and now we are going digital we are realising how many more people can share in all these musical games and lessons.

That’s why we’d love to hear where you are from and what position you hold…As music teachers we are always looking for ideas, aren’t we – the perfect song or game to show at a concert, how to give all our children percussion instruments and feel confident, how to gather the children effectively at the beginning of a lesson etc.. so many things to think of!
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This forum is a community for us to talk, share ideas, discuss issues and celebrate successes. When it comes to music teaching we are all about the practical music-making element… this is the part that most teachers panic over – but we know it can be fun!

Looking forward to hearing from you and happy music teaching!

Sally….