by Kimberlee Conway Ireton

In April and May, 11 Bethany moms and 12 young children met weekly for a music class led by Trudy Shepard. Each week Trudy led us in playing rhythm instruments, dancing, singing, and play-acting.

A week before the class started, my 2½-year-old son, Jack, and I went to an orientation and got a pair of wooden rhythm sticks (Jack likes to pretend they’re a guitar) and a CD of the songs we would sing in class. Since our family’s only CD player is in the car, we listened to “God’s Children Sing” whenever we drove.

In fact, we’re still listening to it—two months after the class ended. Jack’s routine when he gets into the car is always—and I do mean always—to request what he calls “the hallelujah song.” For a while he wanted me to play it over and over again, until I thought I would go crazy if I heard the hallelujah song one more time. Then we started singing it in class, as a circle dance, and Jack loved it even more. So much for my sanity.

Despite my antipathy toward the hallelujah song, I delighted to watch Jack learn about music and about participating in a highly structured class over the course of the nine weeks. He began by simply taking everything in and not participating much beyond watching. By the end of the nine weeks, he was trying to sing along and actively following Trudy’s lead with the rhythm instruments and scales.

At home, he began fashioning guitars out of almost anything (a stick, a pastry brush, a coaster) and using them to accompany his singing. “Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah! Praise ye the Lord!” he sings. Then he cries, “Faster!” And he plays and sings it faster, until his little fingers are missing the “guitar strings” as often as they’re hitting them and the words are so truncated and slurred, you can’t tell what they are.

No matter. I applaud anyway, because what does matter is his obvious delight in making music, a gift he received in Trudy’s music class, a gift I want to encourage and that I hope keeps growing.