The Wonderling featuring Rie Sinclair

I’m an Emmy Nominated songwriter, recording artist and audio producer. 20 years ago I started making music professionally for ABC/Disney in the US. I’m also a mum to a music graduate currently furthering his degree in therapy. As a day-job, I make pop hits for TV Dramas, or as I like to say, “another dimension of reality”. But I have this passion for the next generation of thinkers, creators and philosophers, drawing from my own interests in philosophy, science and poetry.

It's said that the Science of Awe is the secret to thriving. The Wonder Club was a seedling idea while in a study group with a Rabbi who occasionally side-quested into gematria (a semiotics with numbers). Jung is also a fun read on numbers and synchronicity.

Around this time, I had been writing music in a band called Oliver the Penguin, taking all kinds of liberty with metaphor by connecting laws of our natural world to the parallel ways they might play in social relationships. So, I started thinking it might be fun to fuse art + science (STEAM - science, technology, engineering, arts, maths) into bite-size melodic rhymes for kids. My bandmate and I had been pitching jingles as well, and I’d noticed there’s not much short-form music today which acts as a stepping stone between gibberish and, say, The Beatles.

Classic Nursery Rhymes were intended for primary school children. They built social bonds through shared experience. In 2017, articles started popping up in print on the growing need for Nursery Rhymes when Ofsted inspector Amanda Spielman mentioned “children who can sing a song and know a story off by heart aged four are better prepared for school.” Philip Pullman was interviewed, and expressed how they were once a crucial - and enjoyable - tool for language development. India Knight had wrote a piece on how they help children make sense of the world and build a moral framework. Music and Rhymes are magic for our long-term memory, and our imagination is an integral part of our ecosystem. But many older rhymes are antiquated and problematic.

More recently, I’ve noticed a resurgence in kid’s poetry. Early last century, children would find Eleanor Farjeon or Beatrix Potter. In the UK, the newly opened Manchester & Edinburgh Poetry Libraries, and also Southbank’s National Poetry Library in London – have amazing sections for children. Manchester opened not long after lockdown, and I felt perhaps the timing was ripe to find a way to release these into the world, if not just to help instil early learners with the tools become adaptable problem-solvers (rather than passive consumers). If classic rhymes allowed children to grow in emotional intelligence, The Wonder Club hopes to support an inquisitiveness without the Fear of Value Judgement.

This project is for all young explorers, but can promote an intuitive way of understanding the world for gestalt and picture-thinkers, and those more inclined toward pattern-recognition. I think there’s a growing need to “normalise” divergent and diverse thinking, where it is key to one’s potential.

But ideally, The Wonder Club should foster parent and child engagement. When my son was young, I recall a desire to find content which added value to his cognitive development, and enriched our world. Melodies can have a stickiness to them, and the bonding between parent and child through music is so unique.

“I’m reporting in on our field test with your numbers songs and I have to say ... L. loves them. We often catch her humming the tunes. In fact, some of them have implanted themselves in my mind too, especially elevenses (although my favourites have to be 9 and 5). Plus, the song about Pluto got her asking questions and we've spent the whole weekend doing space things, building a scale model of the Solar System. She's now fully au fait with the IAU and accepts their decision on Pluto.” – C.H., father of L. Age 4, Manchester, England

The Wonder Club was first imagined as screen-free engagement, so I think it’s well-suited for Yoto, which inspires introspective-imaginative play and daydreaming (an often under estimated strength of dyslexics). I was – what would now be classified as – Hyperlexic as a child. I also had 2 imaginary friends. I recall very early memories making up songs with them in our “imaginary” library.

I also have fond memories of the Fisher Price record player, with its plastic, pastel discs. I loved playing songs on repeat. The nodes in the grooves which enabled it to work like a music box were quite tactile. Our senses are tools for calculating the world around us and are fundamental to learning. But I also tend to be more inclined toward forms of kinesthetics, which is probably how I ended up in music!

This wee collexion was crafted with field recordings and analogue synths, along with ukulele, glockenspiel, wood blocks, and a toy piano. This intentional sonic architecture offers a unique and accessible experience for children.

Ideally, this is the first in a musical series of early learning concepts which fuse together other STEAM-focused ideas into short clever rhymes. They align a little more with the Montessori approach, or Iain McGilchrist’s 4 pillars to knowledge: Science, Reason, Intuition and Imagination. As Physicist Brian Cox might explain, we should start with “the way the world works” when employing the imagination to understand abstract concepts like a number. I’m also working on releasing these as a karaoke version for children who love performing. And then perhaps a collexion of sounds to nod off to. I have all kinds of ideas, but we will see what can be squeezed in in-between the day-job, which I wouldn’t have been able to make The Wonder Club without!