Fun, music and movement for little movers and shakers

Ross Winston & Little Ted

Little Ted!I come from a family in which music was important.  My brother and I were taken regularly to concerts and music was often being played in the house.  I began to learn the piano from the age of 8, switching at 14 to guitar, which remains my main instrument and which features in my music groups.  I later went on to study music more formally, gaining BA and MMus degrees from the University of East Anglia.

I discovered PRESMA in the early 1980s when my wife and I took our daughter to a music group run by Peter Ellis, one of the founding PRESMA teachers.  I soon became interested in running my own sessions, training with Peter from whom I learned a great deal, and starting my first groups in 1984.  Though at one point I had 14 groups a week, I now run just 4, in order to make room for other activities, including teaching for the Open University and teaching guitar, both at evening classes (for adults) and privately (for all ages).

Many adults feel unconfident when it comes to music, which is a great pity as it limits their enjoyment of what can be an intensely rewarding encounter.  When active involvement in music is part of a child's everyday experience from an early age, it becomes something with which they feel familiar and comfortable.  It is my conviction that all children are capable of understanding, enjoying and expressing themselves through music (and that it carries a host of additional benefits, social as well as educational).

In my sessions I aim to foster in the children a sense that music belongs to them.  They are introduced to the basic musical elements through songs, rhymes, stories, movement and playing simple percussion instruments.  They absorb the meaning and use of such musical building blocks as rhythm (including the rudiments of rhythmic notation), pitch (both melody and harmony), dynamics (loud, soft and gradations in between) and timbre, whilst having fun.  The emphasis is on enjoyment; the learning follows naturally.