 In our music lessons we always use a big range of different activities and that's designed very specifically not only to address the multi-dimensional aspects of music but to try and promote this deep thinking. So for example in our way of approaching the music classroom I'm not thinking about a particular skill or concept from just one perspective. I'm always thinking about it from multiple perspectives. I want the children of initially its music so I want them to engage orally and kinesthetically. Then I also want them to discover the components of that knowledge. Then we'll reinforce that with writing activities and then later on we'll go on with compositional and improvisational activities. I want the children to really understand this particular aspect of any music learning from every possible aspect. The other part of that too is that once the children have learned something I will then do that thing we call it in our way of teaching more deeply internalising. So for a musician you have to be able to make the music for the small children sing the song. Can you sing the song and clap a different rhythm? That's quite complicated because the rhythm work comes out of a different part of the brain to the singing work. So we're engaging more of the brain to help internalise, make more deep the learning for that particular aspect. And we have sequenced that sort of learning right throughout the 14 years of education really. So those many different types of activities are all trying to make the learning more internalised, much deeper learning, much more independent and owned by each child. So in the classroom we're always going to use a wide range of modalities in the teaching. We want the kids to try and use all of their capacities. We all know that some have a preference for a particular modality in learning and we try and acknowledge that. But actually we want the children to develop strength in all areas. That's part of what our goal is. The children I think respond to the challenge of that. Do we know, we talk about it, of this child, did she sing very well but was she correct when she did the rhythm? Or this child is rhythmically very strong but what happened when you were then singing? So the children develop an understanding of their own strengths as well. But what we're trying to do all the time is help the children become the best musician they can. No matter what I ask them to do, I want the children to be drawing on all their faculties. When we're talking about music education this notion of improvisation is a very big one. And there's research that says improvisation and compositional activities are sort of the biggest activity that's got the greatest amount of brain function at that time. With the very little ones of course, what does that look like? It might be that we're playing a game like here we go around the mulberry bush and I might ask a child what else could we put on? When you think of another thing that we could wear that might make us warm. So for a three or a four year old that improvising is really within a very set context but we're asking the children to start to think a bit more broadly. By year one once we've got some conscious work they might know so and me and la or ta or teetians are the first elements and I might give them a rhythm and ask them to sing. We might be playing a game which requires some word improvisation but then when the child tries to put a new word in it doesn't fit so they have to feel how that new element will fit inside a known song. So even from the very early stages this idea of improvising is very important and composing. Our children use the improvising as a basis then for written work which we'd call composing. If we can start down here with three and four year olds that develops very powerfully all the way up to the high school. I think it's interesting that the way that we teach we feel that the skills that are learned, the thinking skills that are learned in our music program that has enormous transfer across the curriculum. Do we have formal scientific research around that in my program? Not yet but we're working on it. However we have a whole lot of anecdotal research so we have very experienced teachers here in the school and when we first started the program from the kindergarten or prep that came up in the grade school I asked those experienced teachers to watch very carefully. Did they notice any different capacities in the children now in mathematics, in science, in English, in spelling? What about their understanding of syllables? What about their phonomic recognition? All of the teachers early on said that they noticed a remarkable difference. And that's gone on year after year after year we have the teachers report to us that the children seem to have these extra capacities that they seem to have another set of skills. Certainly there are very deliberate cross-curricular skills like memory that's one of the things that we do all the time. Because it's a singing-based curriculum then of course we're using text, we're using words perhaps that they're less familiar with. I may be using old English songs or Scottish songs that have unfamiliar words that we're talking about what those words mean. So I think a program like this has enormous implications. As well I think the structure of our lessons, the way that we teach has small three-minute segments where there might be a fun activity, a game, a more relaxed activity and then there's quite a focused little activity. And then we'll move on to something a bit more relaxed again. And I think that model of lesson planning and not just for the younger ones but for the older kids as well, that model develops this real focus in the children when we need it. And we find even with our very young children sitting for half an hour listening to a performance, selling in assembly, these are the sorts of skills that we don't see in other children. So yes, I think this sort of a program has enormous benefit across the curriculum.