Education That Arrives Through Music

Clutching a yellow plastic bat, 2-year-old Scott Youngstead ran between two rows of older children who were belting out the lyrics to “Tidepool Life,” while music teacher Birdie Cloak pounded away on a piano.

“Looking like water flowers, on one foot sea anemones sway; their open tentacles close over food that comes their way . . . , “ the children sang in unison.

Abruptly, Cloak stopped playing and sprang from her seat. “When I get to that curly stuff,” she said, referring to her piano trills, “I always think I’m a sea anemone.” She began to demonstrate, swaying in place, and 22 small bodies mirrored her motion. Satisfied, Cloak sat down to play again.

“Mollusks have soft bodies, and shells that are hard; look for barnacles on rocks, and don’t forget sea urchins and stars . . . ,” they sang. Soon, even Scott got the hang of it and hovered at their elbows, strumming the business end of his bat as though it were a guitar.

The children meeting in a small Laguna Canyon house in recent weeks are part of a special two-week summer school program, an offshoot of the “Academics in Music” program she has created and teaches during the regular school year for kindergarten through third-grade students in Laguna Beach. For an hour each day, the children rehearse the songs from a songbook they take home with them, as well as a tape sung by her daughter, Jill, 19.

And as far as their teacher is concerned, the experiment, has been a resounding success.

“Oh, you sound so pretty!” exclaimed Cloak, swiveling around on her piano seat. “I wish you could hear what you sound like from up here!”

A Medley of Songs

Others will have a chance to hear Cloak’s unusual choir--and her still more unique songs--at the last weekend of Laguna Beach’s Sawdust Festival. The singers, who are mostly the children of Sawdust Festival artists and artisans, will perform a medley of songs about whales, fish, amphibians, Laguna Beach and the festival itself at noon Friday and Sunday.

All the songs were written by Cloak, 44, a former rock ‘n’ roll music arranger who earned a master’s degree in music education in 1986 at Cal State Fullerton.

Some of the children had already learned them at the Top of the World and El Morro elementary schools, where Cloak has taught since January, 1982. But even those who were new to the lyrics have caught on quickly. “Kids are so sophisticated now,” she said. “Their ears are actually quicker to pick up the harmonies than adults’ are.”

The trick, she said, is “to have the children work while they have a good time, so they don’t realize they’re studying.”

Cloak, a mother of two, compares her regular program to “Sesame Street,” except that her students are not observers, but participants.

“Kids have so many interesting things to do these days, you really do have to get up there and convert them” to learning, she said.

Songs such as Cloak’s do help young children learn academics, said Dee Namba, a second-grade teacher at Top of the World school. “It’s kind of like a memory trick” to help the students memorize facts from their regular lessons, she said.

They also promote students’ learning in other ways, Namba said. When one of Cloak’s songs referred to rorqual whales, none of the students knew what kind of whale that was. “Birdie just said, ‘Find out,’ ” said Namba, adding that it prompted one boy to research the subject. “She introduces vocabulary they haven’t had before.”

(Cloak said rorqual refers to types of whales that have furrowed underbellies through which they strain their food.)

Cloak, whose first name used to be “a cruel name--you have to promise not to print it,” has been “Birdie” since her days with the ‘60s rock group, the Association. She legally changed her name then and has taken to signing even official documents, such as her driver’s license, with a symbol resembling a sea gull in flight.

Writing catchy songs as teaching tools was something Cloak began doing by chance five years ago, when her son, Jackson, entered kindergarten at Top of the World school. As a parent volunteer in his classroom, she said, she was disturbed to see “the same music books as when I was teaching school 20 years ago.”

Updating of Lesson

Cloak said she thought the music lessons should be updated, and soon she wrote a song about Martin Luther King. “Then a kindergarten teacher said, ‘Can’t you write a song about the Tooth Fairy,’ ” Cloak recalled. “I said, ‘Sure, I’ll try.’ ”

When Jackson, now 10, entered first grade, Cloak planned to move with him, but “the kindergarten teacher said, “ ‘We want you too!’ ” So she began working with two grade levels. The same thing happened when her son entered second and third grades. Now, she said, she spends about eight hours a week teaching up to 80 children at a time in 30- to 40-minute sessions at the schools.

In the meantime, her songwriting has snowballed. To date, she has researched and written 70 songs about science, history, math, reading, self-esteem and music itself.

“The teachers give me a list (of subjects), and I take the list and do background research,” Cloak said. “The research takes the bulk of the time. . . . I’m insatiable about finding out everything I can about a subject, beyond what the teachers give me. In ‘Welcome to Laguna Beach,’ the only thing (landmark) I didn’t put in the song was the sewer vent--that thing up on the hill (visible from Laguna Canyon Road) that looks like a castle,” she said.

Cloak has no hard-and-fast method for writing songs that are intended to teach. Once the research is done, “I just have the information in front of me, and I start going through the chord changes, and I pray and I don’t analyze at all,” she said.

Take a Lot Longer

“I’ve written some songs in 10 minutes,” she said. Others may take a lot longer.

While doing research for her master’s thesis, Cloak said, she was unable to find any other music education program like the one she has devised. So she is now putting together a book on her methods.

“I want to see a book of these songs in every primary grade classroom in the public schools,” Cloak said. “Music is being cut out of the curriculum all over,” but “if it’s Arbor Day and they’re studying the life of a tree, I want children to have a song about trees.”

Her own early experiences with music were not so benign. “My parents gave my sister and me piano lessons, and I hated it,” she said of her childhood. “My sister was the brilliant, gifted one, and I was the one who was always making things up” and goofing off.

“In college, I enjoyed music a little more, but I really wasn’t exposed to the creative aspects of it,” she said. “Then I met and married Russ (Giguere of the Association) and I got involved in rock and roll” while also earning her teaching credential.

After she and Giguere split up, Cloak worked for a Los Angeles music publishing house. She moved to Laguna Beach 17 years ago and began supporting herself through substitute teaching, private piano lessons and free-lance harmonic transcription.

Parent-Raised Funds

Although Cloak worked with elementary school children for free during the first two years of her Academics in Music program, she was paid $400 for the 1984-85 school year, $150 for the 1985-86 school year and about $5,000 in parent-raised funds for the 1986-87 school year. She now is classified as a “district consultant” in music.

Sawdust Festival artists have contributed $2,000 toward Cloak’s program for the 1987-88 school year, the Laguna Beach Rotary Club has donated $500 and a group of parents is attempting to raise more funds. Cloak said she has given the Sawdust Festival children six group music lessons for free this summer as a way of thanking their parents.

(Cloak, whose husband, Jack, is a project manager for a construction firm, also teaches piano lessons.)

Parents of many of her students are delighted at the results of Cloak’s program. Chris Krach, a potter who exhibits her ceramics at the Sawdust Festival, said her 5-year-old daughter, Krista, is “enjoying it (music rehearsals) so much. . . . She knows all the songs, she plays the tape at home, I know all the songs, my husband knows all the songs. . . .”

Maria Globus’ twin 7-year-olds, Robin and Rachel, will also be in the Sawdust Festival show. “They love (the singing), and the tapes she gives them, we listen to them in the car,” Globus said. “They were asking about the songs--there’s one about Martin Luther King and the Civil War, they remember the dates. I was just amazed that they could put (the information) together because they can sing it.”