Publication: Songbook for the Montessori Classroom

“A child is already a complete person, to be accepted as such.”

The Montessori Library, a subscription-based Montessori platform for teachers, administrators and parents, now includes a song book for the Montessori classroom. The Red Rods Report by retired Children’s House Guide Matt Levin is a collection of 46 original songs that highlight Montessori thought and materials, arranged to reflect the classroom areas.  The songs are written to describe a material, how it’s used, and how it’s fun.

Subscribers can access the online version or a downloadable version to The Red Rods Report. Users will get songs with lyrics and music on facing pages, as well as updates with new songs [“Have You Enjoyed the Ovoid?”, “What the Hand Does”] announced as completed. Author Matt Levin shared his background and inspiration with The Montessori Post.

What does The Red Rods Report include? Sensorial songs include “Cube, Cone, Cylinder, and Sphere” and “Try the Trinomial Cube.”  Math songs include “1-2-100,” and “My Bird’s-eye View.” The collection also includes songs “Language is an Outlaw,” “Captain to Cartographer” and “Glad I’ve Got Meaningful Work,” an a cappella doo-wop for Everyday Living.  
 
It provides a song for animal kingdoms from invertebrates through reptiles through mammals, plus bones, rocks, and trees, and a song for each planet.   And there are one or two lullabies, and a chant or two, like “Please, Please, Push in Your Chairs.”  Many songs include live links to hear studio-recorded, and some home-produced, recordings.

When did you start writing music for the Montessori classroom?  Long, long ago, maybe my second or third classroom year, as a contributor to our kindergarten-group performance.  I don’t know why but we needed a fish song, so I made one up.  Probably just the chorus and a verse, back then.  All my songs grow across years.  Some time after, I began just listing fish names by sound—pickerel, mackerel, stickle-back, eel.  It made a pattern for lots of my science’s songs to follow.   Sometimes in circle, I would gravely say I’d like to sing the Alphabet Song.  Z-y-x, w-v-u-t, s-r-q-p…   One year when we were learning names, I fit everyone’s name into the tune of Jingle Bells.   I began as an assistant with a teacher whose 3^rd years would join her in a long, rhythmically complicated recitation of The Three Bears.   Kids, I learned, can learn anything fun.   After my third or fourth year, I began teacher-training, knowing there’d be a final project to complete the course-work.  I began a folio of songs about materials, with a couple of For Fun songs.    Singing in circle year after year it occurred to me that Old McDonald and Bingo and Row Your Boat and as many others as I could fit—could all be jammed into one song, so we sang Old Mac Donald had a Dog (and Bingo was his name-o!).   

Who and what are your musical inspirations? My father always played records, Sundays, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, Glen Miller, Beethoven and Gershwins.  My parents liked South Pacific, Oklahoma, and Stop the World.  Sinatra.  I played Peter, Paul, and Mary and Joan Baez and my sister’s Beatles’ 45’s.   At bedtime I’d listen to Fats Domino, The Platters, Mary Wells, AM radio.   Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, long- time writing influences, Leonard Cohen, Laura Nyro, Anthony Newley, Lehner and Lowe, Rogers & Hammerstein, Willie Nelson, Dolly, Tammy, Patti Page.   Dylan.  It gets to be a long list, fast, a very long list.  

What stands out to you most about Dr. Montessori’s writings, philosophy and work? A schoolroom that allows—facilitates!– a child to explore, self-determine, and grow, by suggestion, and preparation of a child’s environment, and staying out of the way.  That a child is already a complete person, to be accepted as such.   Mixed-age classes all together 3 years in a row; kids learning from others their age.   ‘All children have a natural desire to learn and they should be given the freedom to explore their surroundings and discover new things at their own pace.’   She really gets kids and she really gets learning and created an environment I had always wanted to be a kid in.

The Red Rods Report is your first e-book for teachers.  What do you hope that readers will get from the collection? A lot of entertainment and some laughs.  Beyond that, I hope the songs prove useful in class, as songs or as poems to send home, to demonstrate color box three, perhaps, that would be good, that would be useful, that would be good.  

What would you say to encourage others interested in writing music?  In publishing books? Sing.  I destroyed my voice at 16, but in my head, and in private, I sing.  Walk around and around a nice private place, pick a topic, and sing whatever comes to you.  If you like what you’ve said, write it down. Always have pen and paper in a pocket.  Walk around some other days and sing that line you like over and over until you think of another one.  Write it down, and expect to revise.  Do your research. Sing, and listen to songs of all kinds.  As to publishing, alas, I have no clue, other than ‘never give up, never surrender,’ and get lucky.

What else would you like to add? I’d like to add (ax² +b+c) + (a-b) as if I knew what it meant.  I’d like to add I didn’t really ever intend this to be an “e-book for teachers” so much as it is for the kids.   They LIKE singing the words “hot-blooded mammal,” and they like making the mammal noises.  They like clapping after each “power of two” (clap) and chanting “please! Please! Push in your chairs!”  It’s a picture book, after all.   But if the grown-ups dig it, they’ll share it with their kids and perhaps everybody’ll go around singing, “Power of two, the power of two—”