Pictured- A student at Grove Park Community Special School plays the Babel Drum
To mark Children’s Mental Health Week 2024 (5-11th Feb 2024), Percussion Play highlights how making music in the great outdoors can improve a child’s mental health and how music therapy can support all aspects of the curriculum and a child’s development.
This year’s theme for the week is My Voice Matters and is about empowering children and young people by providing them with the tools they need to express themselves. The awareness week was founded by Place2Be in 2015, which provides mental health services in over 500 schools across England, Scotland and Wales. Around three children in every primary school class have a mental health problem and many more struggle with challenges from bullying to bereavement.
Percussion Play, the world-leading manufacturer and designer of outdoor musical instruments, has a wealth of research dedicated to the benefits of music-making outdoors. Its White Paper, Hitting the High Notes, highlights that music is an invaluable resource when it comes to maintaining and improving children’s mental health; it sparks creativity, inspires innovation, stimulates emotional response and development.
Research has consistently demonstrated the positive impact of music and musical engagement on both mental health and child development. Likewise, the effects of exposure to green space, daylight, and fresh air on mental and physical wellbeing have been proven to be similarly crucial. Access, therefore, to outdoor musical instruments is sure to maximise the benefits of both time spent outdoors and musical participation to provide an active solution for the improvement and maintenance of children’s mental health.
Music therapy benefits cognitive, emotional, and social issues as well as the physical needs of people. It has proven to be an effective way to help alleviate symptoms and provide a sense of inner calm to people. For this reason, music therapy is becoming an increasingly popular form of holistic 'healing'.
Music can be a great way to express yourself even when you may not know how to. Outdoor musical instruments are perfect for children who fancy experimenting and expressing themselves through music without the humdrum of traditional scales, ideal for parents and teachers keen to introduce a child to the world of music while encouraging creativity and self-expression. Designed to kick-start the creative juices, their simple pentatonic scales ensure an instant and gratifying musical experience, with the focus on drawing out the inherent musical nature of all children through play.
Percussion Play is seeing an ever-increasing interest in its inclusive outdoor instruments that are played across the world in schools, camps, libraries, parks, hospitals and senior living communities. Percussion Play’s instruments are designed to bring people together to create uplifting music. Its mission is to inspire people musically, promote curiosity, and provide opportunities for meaningful musical engagement outdoors.
A recent case study of Percussion Play’s instruments at Grove Park Community Special School can be viewed here. The primary school in East Sussex enhanced its outdoor space with Percussion Play’s instruments to provide music therapy for its students.