Teresa Coelho has made a living teaching movement to children, and she is celebrating her 15th year teaching classes in Marblehead at the Unitarian Universalist Church.
Coelho is the director of Music Together of Salem, which is part of the larger organization Music Together. Providing fun, educational family music classes in more than 3,000 communities across the globe, Music Together uses research-based music-education curriculum to teach children ranging in age from newborn to five years old. The curriculum provides tools for the children to advance their musical development.
Coelho said the goal is to achieve what is known as “basic music competence.”
“It’s starting from the viewpoint that all children are musical,” Coelho said. “So we are all wired the same way, we can learn how to speak a language, we can learn how to make music, and we see music as a language.”
She said the focus is not on talent, but on development.
Originally from Brazil, Coelho moved to the United States to study at the Berklee College of Music and soon met her husband and settled on the North Shore. She originally got involved in the program after the birth of her son. Previously, she had done tours across the country and internationally with her band. While she was at home taking care of her son, she would try different songs to play for him. She then heard about the Music Together curriculum and took him to a class in Brookline.
She loved it so much that she got involved and began training for the classes to be able to teach. She ran classes for two years in Salem and Swampscott, but when a teaching position opened up in Marblehead in 2008, she jumped right in.
The classes, Coelho said, support learning in all areas including cognition, spatial awareness, socialization, coordination, and fine-motor skills.
“When we do the activities, it assists the children to go on the pathway of developing their basic music competence while supporting all of their development,” she said.
Though the classes have structure, the children are allowed to explore and discover different beats and melodies, rather than following specific instructions to match the rhythm of a song exactly.
“It’s not formal instruction. We’re never telling the kids, ‘Do this, do that,’” she said. “We let them explore the same way they’re learning, from the grown ups around them, how to talk.”
A number of different musical instruments are used during the classes including tambourines, wrist bells, egg shakers, and triangles. At the end of the classes, Coelho leads what she calls a “jam session,” during which she takes out a basket of various instruments for the children to play with.
She said one of her favorite parts of teaching children’s music and movement is seeing the kids sing and dance to songs that don’t normally appear on the radio and that use different scales. She referenced a scale they use, known as a Greek mode, that brings her joy when she sees kids singing along.
“You would not hear anything like that on the radio. The kids are exposed to something that ordinarily, they wouldn’t,” Coelho said. “When I see a two-year-old singing the song in a Greek mode, something that we do not expect, and the joy and singing, I’m like ‘Oh my gosh, I did my job well.’”