Imagine That! Hello Weather Week 8

FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING

Meaningful Listening: To make listening meaningful, we must listen with expectation and purpose. Making listening meaningful could be organized into three phases: 1. Engage: focus students’ listening by presenting a puzzle or challenge. 2. Describe: encourage students to say and discuss what they hear, see, think, and know. 3. Demonstrate: provide opportunities for students to demonstrate what they hear.

Children’s Humor: Humor is limited by their experience and by their cognitive development. It is dependent on the ability of the child to pretend and to have a playful orientation toward the situation in which humor occurs. Humor also is social. Children laugh longer in a group than when alone. Between the ages of three and four, children delight in conceptual incongruity, the invention of words and the production of nonsense sounds.

Self Controlled Action: The development of body awareness in the preschool aged children goes beyond labeling and moving specific body parts, to focusing and controlling movement of one’s body. This activity is structured to take body awareness a step further by including aural signals without visual cues. When a specific signal such as walking, running or ready stop is heard on the CD, it allows the child to focus on an aural signal, to process the meaning of the signal and then to transfer the meaning to a self controlled action.

Integration: This activity involves the integration of several learned skills such as:
- Sense of timing, sequencing and anticipation
- Interactions structured within a social setting
- Actions and motions that are described through language

Ensemble: This activity provides opportunity for pre-ensemble skill development. Listening for the appropriate entrance, timing the participation, accomplishing the rhythmic playing or saying of the words with other performers and controlling the ending of playing are all skills required to perform in an ensemble.

Music as a social activity: … “ Music is an intensely social activity. There is an increasing amount of literature that highlights the key impact which peer groups, the family, the relationships between teacher and pupil and between pupils themselves have upon a child’s interest in and knowledge about music and indeed on their developing personal identity as ‘musical’ ( O’Neil, 1997 ; Taebel, 1994 ). “

Aesthetic Awareness: Sometimes the most unusual sounds can strike a chord at the center of the soul. Learning to search for that which is beautiful, listening to that which is beautiful to the hearer and discussing beautiful sounds are the beginnings of an aesthetic awareness that lasts a lifetime.