Making music with kids: early childhood music

Showing posts with label early childhood music. Show all posts

Friday, September 16, 2011

The secret to success?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html

I found this article very interesting, because as a Kindermusik/Orff Schelwerk trained teacher I'm all about incremental development and the chance to experiment without risk of failure or mistakes. And this seems, at first glance to contradict this idea. But as I read further, I started to feel really good about what I do as a teacher, as a music parent. Because, see, music is one area where, while I can set it up so there's no complete failure, there's also no complete success. This is why those early songs keep recurring-the child might rock to a song as an infant, play rhythm instruments to it or move to it as a toddler, sing it as a preschooler, and play it on an instrument as an early school aged child. What's more, once they've learned the song on an instrument, they'll first work on just finding those notes in the appropriate order, and then on making sure rhythms are correct, moving on to articulations and expressive development. In each step, each successive success, each successive step builds-but at the same time, it's NEVER perfect. It never can be. So each success comes with it a corresponding "failure". Not a big one, not a total failure (although anyone who is involved in music long-term will eventually have one, or many), and maybe not even one recognized by casual listeners-but you know.

That's very different from academics-where success is reaching a pre-identified number, and it's not possible to do better than perfect, at which time you go on to the next step. Once you've got 100% on a spelling list of 10 words, there's not much else you're going to learn from those words. Once you've mastered adding 1 digit numbers, you're not going to get much out of practicing them except for maybe a little more speed. But in music, you can ALWAYS get more out of a piece. You can always extend, You can always grow. You can always do it a different way.

The same is true with other fine arts. I have yet to know an artist who is happy with a completed work for very long-they always see the next step. Dancers and actors are their own worst critics-and best teachers. I'm not saying fine and performing arts is the only way to get this experience of success and failure simultaneously, or that it's the only way to build character-but it definitely helps, and I'm very, very honored and glad to be able to be part of it for my students.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Parents can help babies develop rhythm ~ Moving to the beat an early step to learning music, research shows

March 11, 2007

Parents can help babies develop rhythm ~ Moving to the beat an early step to learning music, research shows

The Associated Press
Updated: 6:40 p.m. CT June 2, 2005

WASHINGTON – Gently bounce a baby while you sing, and you’ll usually get squeals of glee. But it’s not just fun: Feeling the beat helps wire babies’ brains to hear rhythm.

So says new research that tested moms and babies doing what comes naturally — dancing around together.

Everybody knows babies love music. Around the globe, parents sing to their infants in a special way, with a distinctive high pitch that’s soothingly slow for a lullaby and elaborately bright at playtime. Babies catch on quickly, able to perceive aspects of melody and recognize different beats at just a few months of age.

Important for development
As psychologist Laurel Trainor studied how babies perceive music, she noticed that parents hardly ever sing to them without bouncing or rocking or playing with their feet. She wondered if that movement was important developmentally.

Her research shows it is: Using multiple senses helps the brain learn about rhythm — how we move indeed influences what we hear — Trainor reports in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

“It’s wiring the sensory system,” said Trainor, of Canada’s McMaster University. “That early experience that parents do naturally is probably really important for learning down the road.”

Consider it an early step toward learning to make music, or at least to really appreciate it, said infant development specialist David Lewkowicz, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic University.

“It’s a very clever kind of study,” said Lewkowicz, whose own research also shows that stimulating multiple senses is important for brain development. “When babies are learning about their world, we should never lose sight of the fact that they are learning in a … multisensory context.”

Moving to the beat
Trainor and colleague Jessica Phillips-Silver tested 16 healthy 7-month-olds by having them listen to music made by a snare drum and sticks that had an ambiguous rhythm — no accented beats. Mothers bounced half the infants on every second beat, in a march-like rhythm, and half on every third beat, in a waltz-like rhythm.

Then the researchers played the music again, this time with the beats accented in either the march or waltz pattern.

The babies preferred to listen to the pattern that matched how they’d been bounced. (Trainor measured preference by how long the babies looked at speakers playing the different selections.)

Watching someone else bounce to the music didn’t do the trick. In a series of tests, the babies picked out a rhythm only if they’d been moved to that beat while listening to the original, nonaccented tune.

Nor was vision necessary. Blindfolded babies picked out the rhythm, too, as long as they’d been bounced.

So what if you don’t boogie with your baby?

No one needs continual bouncing, and passive listening certainly isn’t bad. “But they’re not getting the full experience that they would naturally get in most human cultures” without some bouncing along, says Trainor, whose research was funded by the Canadian government. “It suggests that you’re better off to do music in an interactive way.

“It probably doesn’t matter if you listen to Mozart or a rock band or jazz,” she adds. “All those kinds of music and concurrent rhythms go to wire up the brain.”

----

Kindermusik classes for parents and children 0-6 now enrolling! http://memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php

Beyond the Music-Movin' and Groovin' week 1

Welcome to the family! This week in Family time, we began our exploration of everything related to movement by starting with tempo. Tempo simply means "how fast (or slow) are you going". As children grow and develop, they learn all the ways they can move, from crawling as babies, to walking, to running, until they get to the point that you REALLY wish they'd slow down a little! So, in class we will explore both ways to go, go, go, but also ways to slow, slow, slow down a little, to relax, and to control those growing bodies, even when it's hard.

Please go to play.kindermusik.com and use your play card to download a few songs to share with your child. This will let you start listening to the music while waiting for your home materials to arrive, and will greatly increase your child's enjoyment of and participation in class.

Here are some specific songs from class today:
http://play.kindermusik.com/tracks/4264-lento-y-rapido-slowly-and-quickly/

http://play.kindermusik.com/tracks/4262-hop-up-my-baby/

http://play.kindermusik.com/tracks/3892-riding-the-rails/

And a suggested album
http://play.kindermusik.com/albums/203-zoom-e-oh/

This semester we will also be looking at a lot of different animals and the ways they move. A great purchase to have at home, and a very inexpensive one at this time of year, is a deck of animal picture cards. Target usually has these in the dollar section during the back to school season, with either drawings, photographs or both, and at $1, it's hard to beat the price. This year, along with regular animal cards, they have animal movement and sound cards, which are great, too and musical instrument cards.

My personal favorite visual cards, especially for children who are learning a second (or third) language, are the Lang o Learn picture cards. These are more than a little bit pricey, I'm afraid, at about $10 a set (I've found them as low as $6 a set at teaching stores) but the nice thing about these cards is that not only are they nice, full color photographs of animals, objects, people and the like, but that they're labeled on the back in 17 languages, with pronunciation helps.

This week we listened to a horse galloping and trotting. If you have a chance to visit Shelby Farms, you can often observe horses in action out there, or here are some examples from youtube

Horse galloping

Horse trotting (with background music)

We still have spots for a few more friends in our Friday and Saturday classes. If you know someone who is interested, please invite them to check us out at http://memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php or contact me to set up a preview class

Have fun this week making music with your child!

Microphone play part 4

And now, she moves into more serious directions, with some poetry. The first stanza is one she wrote as part of studying poetics using Music of the Hemispheres, which is part of the Michael Clay Thompson Island level Language arts curriculum. The others are, I believe, improvisational and inspired by a desire to fill up the 60 minutes Windows Sound recorder allows.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Lots of nice early learning items on sale

http://www.etacuisenaire.com/catalog/clearance

While most of these are designed for math/science, I've found them helpful in teaching music. We will often use visual pattern blocks to help us figure out musical patterns, or play color patterns with rhythm of the words with counters. I'm especially excited about the dinosaur counters, because I can think of several students who will enjoy this. And two color counters are great for melodic notation and dictation activities, especially magnetic ones on the whiteboard or a cookie sheet. Lots of great items here, so don't miss them!

Friday, August 12, 2011

More picnic play

We had a wonderful music picnic today! Here are some more activities to continue the play at home:
Picnic playset. Great cutting and imaginative play practice for your child!
http://awondertime.go.com/resources/pdf/create-and-play/cutting-pages/picnic-play.pdf

A perfect picnic-visual discrimination activity
http://www.tlsbooks.com/aperfectpicnic.pdf

A whole lot of wonderful picnic activities

http://stepbystepcc.com/picnic.html

Use these along with the songs from our picnic! These are downloadable from http://play.kindermusik.com and here are all the links!

This is just a taste of what you get in a Kindermusik class. Not only do you get the activities in class each week, all designed for your child's age and developmental level, but at home activities as well to take and use and have fun with in your home materials. For these early years, Kindermusik is truly the best choice.

Call 901-678-4244 or visit http://music.memphis.edu/cms/ to register today!

Songs from our musical picnic

Sunday, August 7, 2011

The thrill of 10,000 twinkles

Wonderful article about the benefits of music in the classroom-and at home

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3751207

From early childhood today magazine.

Interested in more music for your child? Visit us at http://music.memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php

Why music? It improves language skills!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2pF7_1Q78A

Northwestern University researchers have found that children who study music for several years improve their ability to learn languages long-term-which is just one of the many reasons to include music in your child's life.

Call 901-678-4244 or visit http://www.memphis.edu/music/cms.php for information about group and individual music classes for children and adults from birth on!

Friday, August 5, 2011

Kiddies on the Keys-Piano for the extremely young

One of the best parts about being a Kindermusik teacher is that I get to work with very, very young children and their parents, inside a nicely equipped music classroom. And one thing that every single child is drawn to, from the time they can walk, is that great big wood box with black and white keys. And for years, I avoided using it, except maybe occasionally playing a song myself. Even though, at age 2, I'd turn around and find my daughter sitting in someone's studio, plunking keys, there was still some part of me that drew a line that said "they're too young". But part of Kindermusik is exploration, and these kids wanted to explore that big wooden box just as much or more as they wanted to explore the egg shakers, rhythm sticks, or even my big drum. So, taking little steps at a time, I began integrating piano into all my classes. And while I'm not going to suggest that every baby/toddler needs a piano at home, I am going to say that if you have one, avoiding the "No, that's grandma's piano! Don't touch" at age 2-3 may not be the best route to take, especially if you want your child to eventually want to play piano down the road.

Here's a few basic steps for guiding your child's piano/keyboard exploration throughout the years. Most of all, remember-you're not giving a piano lesson. You're having fun. When your child is done, they'll crawl/walk away. Let them.

Start with a label:

When you're dealing with infants and young toddlers, as we do in class, it's not so much what they do as what you, as the parent do. Just as, in a Kindermusik class, we'll sing up high and move the baby up high, you can do the same thing on the piano, playing a few notes up high, and a few down low, and labeling them. The same is true with all those other musical opposites that we explore in class weekly. High/low, fast/slow. As your baby becomes a toddler, he'll probably come to the piano and explore too. And yes, that will be open hand, multi-note at a time banging. But it's exploring and it's musical. Label what's there, and give the child ideas for the future. Melodies will come later.

As toddlers get older, they get more independent. Around age 2, many of my students get shy in class and don't want to come to the piano in the classroom, but still love to watch their parents, and will sometimes even tell their parents what to do. And this is the age where they REALLY start to take it home, based on the reports I get "from the field". By about age 2 1/2, they start to show off, and then they can start to follow instructions, and make their hands jump like a frog, or "climb" up or down in pitch, or play quickly or slowly. You also start to see one finger and single note playing.

Around age 3-5, melodic exploration begins, where a child will play a few notes, and, if they've had enough musical exposure, may even comment that "That's Jingle Bells!" as they recognize fragments. The black keys are wonderful for this, because they give a pentatonic scale with no half-steps, and many of the common folk melodies children learn to sing, like Mary Had a Little Lamb require only those 5 notes. Children at this age also can start transferring rhythm patterns to piano in free exploration, and creating their own melodies. If the child is learning melodies in Kindermusik or other music classes, they will often begin playing these on piano, too. Finger independence is beginning, and the children are developing motor control and are able to start playing with different articulations and at different volume levels, so you can now say "Can you play quieter, please" and demonstrate it-and have it stick (for the next minute or two, anyway)

Between age 5-7, I start to see preferences developing. In Kindermusik, we introduce three instruments in this age group-glockenspiel, recorder, and dulcimer. Often a child will prefer one or more of these, and if piano is available, it becomes just another instrument for exploration. Some children LOVE piano-and those are the ones who will happily move to piano lessons as soon as they graduate Kindermusik. Others fall in love with recorder, or with dulcimer, and for them, the next logical step is a wind instrument, such as continued recorder instruction, or a string instrument.

But it all starts with letting the child explore. Enjoy the journey.

Ms. Donna

We explore many instruments in Kindermusik classes this week. We are now enrolling for fall, and please see the full schedule at http://music.memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php

And, if you've been bitten by the piano bug, the community music school offers classes and lessons for all ages, including parents who always wanted to take piano, but never had the chance, or who took piano and quit and now regret it :). http://music.memphis.edu/cms/

Taken from "Put a Piano in Your Exploration Box", a conference session at the 2011 Partnership of Kindermusik Educators Atlanta Regional Conference, by Donna DeVore Metler.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Practice as play-or, how do I get my child to practice?

http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-hours-a-day-should-you-practice/

This article brought practicing to mind. One of the hardest lessons that parents of young musicians need to learn is that practice doesn't just happen, You have to actively TEACH a child to practice, and that's not always easy. Here are a few suggestions I have for practicing with a young, beginning student that work...most of the time.

1) Have a set time to practice, with a set deadline. What works well for my daughter is to practice while a meal is cooking. She knows dinner will be ready "soon", so she doesn't feel that it's as interminable of a time period as "30 minutes" would be, and it's a flexible amount of time where I can pretty easily adjust it if she is really doing well and we want to follow this for awhile.

2) Teach someone else. My daughter does very, very well when she gets to teach someone else-usually her father (for some reason, she doesn't accept that I need to be taught), or even a stuffed animal or doll, her lesson. And in her explanations, I can tell that she's got it, or that she doesn't have it.

American Girl has 18 in doll sized musical instrument sets which seem perfect

It's almost enough to make me wish my daughter played violin, cello, or flute, but my daughter's found ways to create a piano and a recorder for her special friends.

Encouraging recitals helps, too. My daughter LOVES to put on concerts for her stuffed friends when she has a song ready-sometimes including programs.

I've also found, both with my Kindermusik Young Child students and at home, that focusing on repetitions instead of on time is a good way to go. Since Alfred, my alligator puppet, is my companion in Kindermusik classes, I let him help the children practice, too.

The kids push a bead around to "Feed" Alfred each time they play "mouse, mousie" or whatever song they're working on. And, of course, Alfred needs to eat EVERY day :). It's amazing how well this works. The beads and charms came from a necklace kit from Oriental trading-in this case, a "cajun crocodile" themed one, and there are all sorts of cute options. Each one makes 12 or more practice buddies (each necklace has 3 charms-in this kit, one alligator, one firefly, and one dragonfly, so if you don't have a specific mascot, you could easily make more than one per necklace).

I know that eventually, we'll get to the more deliberate practice talked about in the article-but right now, practice is play.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Where do you get instruments?

This is a question that comes up fairly often, so I decided to answer it here.

First of all, local sources:

The Target $1 section often has wooden instruments around Christmas, and sometimes at other points in the year. I wouldn't use these with any child who might put them in their mouth except under supervision, because they're labeled 3+, but they're an inexpensive, and often decent sounding way to build up an instrument collection. The wooden Castanets are especially nice.

Hobby Lobby has handbell sets, both small and large periodically, usually in the section right up by the cash register. These are the ones I use in class, and they are identical to those sold by music stores. Hobby Lobby often runs 40% off coupons online, so check there-with one, a set of handbells is only about $15.

Knowledge Tree, Village Toymaker, Toys R Us, Target Toy Section and Learning House all have a small instrument selection-but they're usually very expensive for what you get-and the sound quality isn't always great. Boomwhackers, the LP kids Percussion line, Woodstock percussion, Hohner, and Remo are sometimes available this way.

Your kitchen-empty containers, plastic storage containers, metal spoons...anything that's not heirloom, silver, or breakable can be used to make music!

Amro Music, Memphis Music and other Music stores. These sometimes carry the Remo or LP kids percussion, but they also carry small percussion instruments in general, and you can assume that these will generally be good instruments. My favorite brands for small percussion are Remo, LP, CP, Yamaha, and Nino. All have proven to be of high quality in the past.

Online-

http://www.kindermusik.com
The Kindermusik store sells many of the instruments used in class in small quantities to parents, and it's not a bad source for instruments. I do find that they're often a little expensive compared to other vendors, but Kindermusik safety tests their instrument to a much greater degree than almost anyone else out there-far more than what is required by law in the US, so especially for something your child will be playing with unsupervised, it's a good choice. Labeling on age tends to be conservative, so you can trust that if something is labeled for under 3s, it's going to stand up to being chewed, spit on, leaked on, thrown, pounded, and generally abused without breaking into sharp parts.

http://www.westmusic.com
West Music, in Coralville Ia, is probably my favorite music store anywhere as far as comprehensive selection, and while they're often not the least expensive on everything, they are reasonably priced, have the materials in stock, so you rarely get back orders (I'm tempted to say never), and ship quickly. They are also one of the few vendors that sells the larger Orff instruments we sometimes use in class-which are expensive, but absolutely wonderful. They have a special "under 3 section", mostly the Hohner Kids, LP, and Remo line.

http://www.empire-music.com
Empire music has lower prices than many other online stores, and has free shipping over $35. However, they do not sort based on age. "Early Childhood", in this case, means birth to age 6-7, so if you have a baby or toddler, I would not assume all of the instruments here are going to be safe for use for less supervised play.

http://www.rhythmband.com
Rhythm Band Inc has been around forever. If you played with those white resonator bars with red wood bases when you were in elementary school, or red wood drums with skin heads, or triangles with wood ball handles, you've probably played a rhythm band instrument. Most kindergarten classrooms have sets of their instruments. They are a good way to build up a collection quickly, but they're not as nice sounding as Remo, LP and the like. They ARE a great source for resonator bars and handbell resources, including nice color coded music. If they say something is "currently out of stock" or "currently back ordered" don't bother to order-you'll probably see it 6 months from now when you've completely forgotten about it. They do not ship quickly under the best of circumstances.

http://www.suzukimusic.com/education/
Suzuki has great prices on recorders, kids percussion, and Orff instruments. One thing I like about their Orff instruments is that they have holders for the extra bars and mallets right on the instrument, which is GREAT for home use. Please note that most of their "kids" instruments are rated 4+ unless they're reselling something made by another company.

Anyway, I hope this helps! Have fun making music!

Friday, September 16, 2011

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Parents can help babies develop rhythm ~ Moving to the beat an early step to learning music, research shows

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Friday, August 12, 2011

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Friday, August 5, 2011

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Saturday, July 30, 2011