On this day, we invited the children to think about what they would like to see around their school. One child was initially very quiet and seemed hesitant to share their ideas verbally. While I was making a small snake for fun, I noticed the child watching closely. Soon, they began making their own snake, extending it longer and longer as they worked. As they became more engaged in the making process, they also seemed to become increasingly comfortable with us and the experience.

This moment reminded me that participation does not always begin with words. For this child, making something alongside us seemed to offer another way to enter the activity and connect. As they became more absorbed in their work, they also appeared more comfortable expressing themselves in their own way. It highlighted for me how art-making can create space for children to participate at their own pace, without requiring them to immediately communicate their ideas verbally. – Emma Daw

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I was both nervous and excited when I started delivering the Westmount, as it was both my first time delivering and my only site with the drop in nature. The engagement for each week is always unknown, but I found week 4 to be a very special week at this site. During week 4 a brother and a sister came into the early ON, and were instantly intrigued by our set up. Their eyes lit up as I explained the activity, intrigued by the sound guessing game we had planned. My first sound was the indoor pool, and the kids guessed it correctly immediately. However the boy drew a blue box with the pastels around his soundscape of the pool. When I asked him why, he said “to make a pool”. When I played the sound of the clock, they both drew very tiny zig-zags, and I inquired why. The boy told me ”they’re waves, because it’s little high and a little low”. However for the sound of cars, which was incorrectly guessed as a ship horn, the zig-zags were very large in comparison.

This showed me just how aware kids are of the different senses, as the boy noticed that the pool includes both the sense of seeing and listening. With the clock sound, the kids were able to describe sound waves without knowing they are the visual representation of sound, and that the intensity of sound gives different amplitudes. However, the biggest thing I found was that the kids saw sound as a form of movement. This idea enraptured me, as it invokes a sense of childlike thinking that I think we forget as we grow into adulthood. It felt like such a bizarre idea at first, but slowly made so much sense that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that already especially as I am a musician. All the senses invoke a sense of life, so of course sound moves! Sound is alive! This was such a beautiful thing that I discovered, something that felt so natural to these two kids. This invokes me to ask more questions about how sound moves, and how it can define neighbourhoods and places, and maybe even moments in time. In what ways can we capture that movement?  – Sneha Desai