ABSTRACT
All pre-school settings, even the most formally organised, make spaces and equipment available for children to play spontaneously. In the free-play times young children continue to integrate musical play as one strand of their ongoing activity, singing to themselves as they play with the trains or making rhythmic movement patterns as they thump dough. But unlike their self-initiated activity in other domains, such as painting, model-making, role play, this musical activity goes largely unnoticed. Play with instruments may be provided for, but otherwise what the adults count as music, and what is usually planned for in music, is confined to a group circle time, when children gather for an adultled song and rhyme session.
