Developmental Notes: See What I Saw Week 1

Rituals: Rituals provide predictable structures in the life of the preschool-aged child and contribute to the child’s emotional development.

Steady Beat: The most fundamental property of music is beat, the underlying repeating pulse. Playing an instrument to a steady beat helps develop a sense of time and the ability to organize and coordinate movements within time. Upper body bilateral motions (both hands doing the same thing at the same time) and alternating bilateral motions (hands taking turns doing the same thing) are easiest for keeping a steady beat.

Body Awareness: The development of body awareness in the preschool-aged child goes beyond labeling and moving specific body parts, to focusing and controlling the movement of one’s body. Our walk/run/stop activity with the hand drum is structured to take body awareness a step further by including aural signals. When a specific signal such as walking, running, jumping, or ready stop is played on the hand drum, it allows the child to focus on the signal, to understand the meaning of the signal and then to transfer the meaning to a self-controlled action.

Pretend Play: Imitation is the first stage of pretend play. As a child imitates activities that may be common life experiences, such as playing at a park, pretend play starts to emerge. Play becomes more complex as the child re-examines life experiences and adds to or changes the play experience.

Literacy Development & Play: “Both literacy development and play involve creating, planning, sequencing, shaping, communicating, predicting, synthesizing, participating, producing and evaluating. Both involve representations of the child’s feelings, thoughts, and actions and representations of actual and imaginary worlds. Expression of self is heightened; yet incorporation of others’ perspectives is also encouraged. Literacy development and play can promote understanding and acceptance of others and provide safe boundaries to examine who one is and who one wants to be.” Read, Play, and Learn!: Storybook Activities for Young Children, by Tonie W. Linder, Ed.D, p17.

Explore & Discover: Preschool-aged children are ready to research, find out more, explore and discover. Asking the children to broaden their understanding and experience of moving a ball somehow other than bouncing or throwing it opens up new play possibilities. Through repeated exploration experiences, the children develop the concept that every object has unlimited possibilities to be explored. They can then transfer this explorer attitude to other Kindermusik activities.

Follow the Leader: In follow-the-leader activities such as “Do As I’m Doing”, children are encouraged to:
• Observe and respond to a steady beat ball motion
• Understand nonverbal communication of gestures and motions
• Sustain attention by staying with a motion for a length of time
• Understand and follow guidelines of the activity.

Building Community: 3 & 4 year-olds are very aware of the people in their lives. Social behaviours are learned interactions that occur through their experiences with various people. Children come to Kindermusik in different stages of social development, which is as it should be. Ha, Ha, This-A-Way provides the opportunity for building community by including all the adults, children, and siblings and by allowing everyone to interact socially within a Kindermusik community.