Music at home-Pathways and shapes

The movement focus for Lessons 5 and 6 is pathways. Our world is most commonly organized in straight lines, emphasizing efficiency and directness. When children have the opportunity to explore lots of different ways to get from one place to another, they enhance their awareness of the world around them, and develop increased agility. When a child creates curves and zigzags with her arms and upper body, she frequently crosses the midline, helping to strengthen her corpus callosum and the ability of the brain’s two hemispheres to communicate with each other. When we explore the space we have around us, we can create new pathways—curved, circular lines; sharp, angular, zigzag lines; straight lines, forward and back, side to side, and all sorts of combinations.

Like other elements of movement, pathways help develop coordination and balance. What fun it is to have new ways to play on the playground, run at the park, and think about different ways to get from here to there.

Other ways to play with pathways include drawing paths with sidewalk chalk outside or with tape or hook-side velcro (my favorite if you have fairly low-pile carpet. One roll can be reused for a large number of learning activities for years as a child grows) inside and following them by walking, crawling, pushing toy cars, or rolling balls (like your sensory balls from your home materials) along them. This is especially helpful in reinforcing concepts as a child gets older, from simple shapes to letters, numbers, spelling words, and much more. I've even used this when teaching graphing to middle school algebra students! You can also draw pathways on paper and encourage your child to follow the pathway with a dot marker or bingo dotter, or to place stickers along the pathway (good for fine motor development).

Our piano skill this week is making and labeling paths on the piano-indicating to your child that they're moving higher, moving lower, playing short notes or long notes, playing on the black keys and white keys, playing one note or many.  There is no wrong way to explore as a toddler, and by labeling what they do, we validate their explorations and encourage vocabulary development that will later turn into playing music.


Have a great week, and enjoy all the pathways in your life!

Music this week-Wiggles and Giggles

We’ve wiggled and we’ve giggled. We’ve rocked. We’ve bounced. And we even crawled while singing “Lukey’s Boat!”

Did you know that the physical act of crawling activates brain development? Carla Hannaford, neurophysiologist and internationally recognized educational consultant, asserts that cross-lateral movements such as crawling activate both hemispheres of the brain in a balanced way. These types of activities “work both sides of the body evenly and involve coordinated movements of both eyes, both ears, both hands, and both feet as well as balanced core muscles.” Activating both hemispheres can heighten cognitive functions and increase learning.* (Carla Hanneford-Smart moves)

Chasing a ball while crawling, making a tunnel out of a cardboard box or a sheet over a coffee table (or a commercial play tunnel-Target is doing their end of summer clearance on outdoor play items now), or pretending to be animals can all be wonderful ways of getting your toddler to crawl, and also works for any older children who happen to be around. If you have children in your family who span a range of ages, this is a great way to involve the older ones in play with the baby, while helping EVERYONE'S brain to function better.

So, crawl to it! Have fun, make music, and we'll see you next week!

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!

Beyond the Music-Wiggles and Giggles, week 1

Welcome, or welcome back, to a new Kindermusik semester as we wiggle and giggle! As our children move from babies to toddlers to preschoolers, they literally MOVE, and move a lot! This semester, we will celebrate that movement and that growth in songs that refer to experiences in a young child's life.

First of all, please use the class code to visit http://play.kindermusik.com and download your class recordings. Since we don't have home materials yet, this will allow you to start listening to the music and improve your and your child's enjoyment of class each week, as you wishy, washy wee! together in your real bathtub, while washing dishes or the car, or just for fun.



Here is a cute, easy to make fish craft out of a paper plate. Why not use a big plate and a little plate, and let them explore "Above the Sea" this week? Participating in simple crafts, whether it's simply by observing and listening, coloring, or even, as a child moves into the preschool years, gluing or even cutting independently, develops fine motor skills and concentration, as well as gives a child an "I did it" feeling of accomplishment.

We still have room for a few more friends in our classes this semester. If you know someone who would love to join our Kindermusik experience, please invite them to come along and to get more information at http://music.memphis.edu/childhood.php. Right now, we have openings in classes on Fridays and Saturdays.



Until next week, have fun making music!

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.