About
I began my journey as an Early Childhood Educator in 1995 as the head teacher in a classroom of toddlers. While working with 2 and 3-year-olds, I quickly discovered that my habit of singing transition time instructions (“Everybody line up, line up, line up”) in a repetitive way not only captured my students’ attention, they started understanding, imitating/singing along with me.
As a musical person, I had always had an inclination to make up simple tunes and lyrics. I started writing my own songs for toddlers, like “Everybody Clap”, “Hello, Hello” and “Bicycle” that we would sing together as part of our morning circle routine.
The other teachers in the preschool asked if I would make up songs for their students, too, so I designed a school-wide music program and led sing alongs every day for every age group in the preschool, from infants to School-Aged children.
When I moved on to work exclusively as a full-time Kindergarten teacher, I supported my students’ literacy awareness by writing pocket chart poems and songs with repetitive sight words. Once I started matching simple tunes to my poems, I saw remarkable acceleration in my students’ ability to decode the words on the chart.
From that point on, I created songs for everything and anything I could!
After many requests from teachers and families, in 2009, I released my first album, “I Know I’ll Grow….”
Over the next decade, I released 5 more albums, available on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Deezer, Itunes etc):
“The Seasons” (2012), “Wonderful You” (2014), “Shadow” (2016), “Senses” (2019) and “I Am A Tree” (2021).
My songs range in focus, from nature (“I Am A Tree”) to memorizing information (“Planets, Planets”) to developing positive self talk/coping mechanisms (“One Step At A Time”), and have been shared/used/celebrated around the world by families, educators, therapists and caregivers.
With millions of views on my Youtube channel and hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify, my music continues to reach more and more children.
Already a fan of my music and looking for more from me? In 2022, I launched my Patreon membership, “Nancy’s Friends and Fans”, where I share weekly music ideas, games, unreleased songs, instructional videos, finger plays, poems, chants and 30-minute themed classes. My videos have a calming, welcoming, open-ended pace, like having a fun, easy musical visit with a friend.
“Every child has a song inside. Its up to us to turn up the volume.”
Nancy’s music has been featured on children’s TV and radio programs, in-flight family entertainment, digital interactive educational platforms and podcasts. Her work has been referenced in educational textbooks, parent and teachers guides, developmental psychology articles and various other online educational resources.
