Blog and News

SHORTLISTED for Music & Drama Education Awards 2023

WHOLE-SCHOOL OCARINA-PLAYING handbook gives clear progression pathways for class music with pupils age 5 to 14. Ocarina-playing, singing and curriculum music is sequenced, with reference to the statutory National Curriculum Music Programmes of Study, the Model Music Curriculum 2021, OFSTED research review (12/7/21) and the refreshed National Plan for Music Education 2022. Download here, or request by post direct from Ocarina Workshop. Read more

OCARINA ACOUSTICS – SCIENCE
The ocarina is played with a breath rather than a blow. Unlike other wind instruments, the ocarina cannot be overblown. It has no tube, no column of vibrating air and thus no wavelength – just a mass of air vibrating in a chamber. The resulting ocarina acoustics are remarkably pure, with few upper harmonics. Read more

‘Play Your Ocarina – Book 1’ is freshly published in COLOUR with the same great tunes PLUS new teaching pages – and all for the same great price.

When you order Play Your Ocarina – Book 1 from Ocarina Workshop, your order will automatically be up-graded to include the newly published full-colour version at not a penny more. Read more

Ocarinas are simply the BEST! Fact.

The evidence is grounded in 34 years of Whole Class Music-making:

The plastic Oc® received the highest accolade of “Best Music Education Product” in the 2015 Music Teacher Awards For Excellence. Three decades of continuous development, rethinking, redesigning, retooling and remaking has brought this musical instrument to the pinnacle of its creation. It remains UK-made under the watchful eye of David and Christa Liggins, whose teaching expertise keeps the needs of both the child in the classroom, and the class teacher, in sharp focus. David and Christa’s child’s-eye-view on the playing of the instrument and their teacher’s-eye-view of methodology give a perspective that has created robust, musical instruments with ready-prepared teaching materials. Read more

I’m just back from the excellent MERYC 2017 Conference in Cambridge, where experts from across the world met to share their findings on Early Years Music. They considered what the unborn baby hears inside the womb, how children engage with music during their first few years and how this develops with the help of skilled practitioners. Read more

To read or not to read: that is the question! How important is it to read?

As a primary school teacher, nothing thrills me more than teaching children to read. Reading is a great achievement and a vital lifelong skill. However, reading music can actually be a barrier to making music. How many class teachers can’t ‘read music’ and therefore assume they can’t help their class to play instruments? Singing is fine; playing an instrument involves reading music… or does it? Read more

The concentration and delight on the faces of the year 2 to year 6 children, and the sound of their confident, musical playing bore evidence of the success of the Ocarina Programme in Central Bedfordshire Hub.

Last October, thanks to SMA, class teachers from 12 schools were introduced to the Ocarina and trained to lead their own class music lessons effectively. Each school was provided with an Ocarina World Record Legacy Class Set of Ocarinas with accompanying teaching resources and the teachers enthusiastically set about teaching their classes to play the Ocarina using Play your Ocarina – Book 1 ‘Starting off’. Read more

As a class music teacher in the 1970s and 1980s, my aim was to get all children playing instruments as well as singing – so for me, the TV Coke advert became “I’d like to teach the world to play”.

In teaching whole-class keyboards, guitar and tin whistle with children aged 7 to 14, this ambition was pretty well realised, and the 15 guitars that I bought from Moore and Stanworth’s in Leicester in 1978 are still in use at Winstanley High School, hanging from the pegs where I first placed them 35 years ago (photo evidence can be provided!). Read more

The rationale for teaching with Ocarinas can most easily be described by the acronym ‘KISS’. The KISS Principle, or ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’, (Rich, 1995) maintains that most systems work best when kept simple, not complicated.

The principle is exemplified by the story of a team of American design engineers who were given a handful of tools, with a challenge that the jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field under combat conditions with only these tools. Hence, ‘stupid’ describes how things can go wrong, and the level of sophistication needed in fixing them. Read more

We invited Christa Liggins, modern language teacher and director of Ocarina Workshop, to explain how her teaching work inspired her learning model…

My modern foreign language classes buzz with the sound of spoken German. Children confidently handle inflexion and vocabulary, ready to converse with a ‘sympathetic native speaker’ as required for GCSE oral. Visual stimuli – pictures, objects, actions – elicit words, questions, phrases, and even new grammatical structures; inhibitions are lost as students are immersed in an increasingly-familiar language. Read more