Developmental Notes: See What I Saw Week 4

Literacy & Dramatic Play enable children to:
- understand specific vocabulary terms
- express their feelings
- demonstrate their understanding through role-playing
- utilize their memory of actions and story sequences
- develop cooperative social skills, problem solving, and ability to coordinate actions with other children

Exploring Wood Instruments: The 3-5 year-old child has a disposition of curiosity and will conduct thorough investigations when given the chance. Exploring wood instruments provides an opportunity for children to learn and discover by finding new information, making comparisons, categorizing, conducting sound experiments, and talking about their findings. This kind of learning strengthens thinking skills which can then be transferred to any other learning experience.

Literacy & Movement: Through moving up and down, back and forth, and climbing up and falling down, the child experiences a variety of ways in which one’s body moves through space and time. Through these movement experiences, the child’s understanding of spatial terms is expanded. This type of active and interactive learning through storytelling strengthens both literacy and movement.

Rondo Form: The predictable nature of the rondo form of the Grasshopper Park Instrumental Medley (ABACADA) makes it possible for the children to anticipate the order of the music and movement. Learning to predict is important in other areas such as: reading comprehension, problem solving, sequencing, memory, and recall.

Analytical Listening: Analytical Listening requires children to discriminate one sound from another, ie: trombone, clarinet, and slide whistle sounds. This leads to identifying personal preferences in recognizing the beauty of sound.

Developmental Notes: See What I Saw Week 2

Steady Beat: Some 3-5 year-olds might exhibit the skill of adjusting their beat to match that of an external sound source. Most frequently this occurs with bilateral motions (both hands doing the same thing at the same time) or alternating bilateral motions (one hand alternates with the other in the motion). Which motion seems to be easiest for your child while keeping the beat?

Vocal Development: Interactive storytelling such as that used in the Grasshopper Park Story fosters vocal development by integrating a variety of vocal experiences, including speaking, singing, and playing with vocal sounds. The child experiences the wide expressive range of the voice by playing with extremes – high and low, fast and slow, loud and quiet, etc.. The child also explores exaggerated dramatic interpretation – everything from whispering to shouting.

Glissando: The music term “glissando” refers to a continuous or sliding movement from one pitch to another.

If you make a tape this week of glissando sounds, please bring it to class and we will listen to them together. If you have a portable instrument from home, please bring that along too, and we can listen to the glissando sounds made on it.

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.

Don't Miss Out on a Great Opportunity!

Wondering about how Kindermusik is going to fit into your preschooler’s life this year?

Transitioning to preschool can be made easier by maintaining some school year routines that have brought joy to your child in the past. Re-enrolling in Kindermusik this fall will actually help your child adjust to their new preschool schedule. Knowing they can count on spending time with you and music will add a sense of comfort and security to the new school experience. With life getting busier, and your child’s activities more independent in nature, Kindermusik is one place the two of you can spend time focused on each other. Loving your child is what it’s all about!

This is not only reassuring to your child, but it should also give you some peace of mind as well as to the “rightness” of continuing on with Kindermusik beyond age 3. Two studies actually indicate that not only does early musical training increase intelligence, but also that the amount of parental involvement can greatly affect the amount of improvement.

A study at Sam Houston State University stated that “parental time spent with a child is a more important factor in predicting intelligence test success than such factors as single parent households, poverty, low parental education levels, and ethnic minority status.” Also, “the experimental group children who were active participants in the Kindermusik classes and whose parents helped them with the home musical activities showed significant gains on the areas of the Stanford-Binet subtests that measured abstract reasoning abilities.”


Classes are Tuesdays at 11:15 at the North Shore Unitarian Church. Come See What I Saw!

Where Does the Time Go?

I can hardly believe Piper is 8 months already! She's a busy girl, with not a lot of regard for sleep. Apparently, it's overrated.

She's started crawling, so it's time to do some more serious baby-proofing again (perhaps we'll set up a gate at the top of the stairs...).

Jacob just had his last day of preschool today. Sigh. Thanks goodness for summer camps! Have you signed up yet?

PS: The fall schedule is up too!

What's in Your Glass?

Jacob used to only drink water and milk. A lot of milk. He was introduced to apple juice a little while ago, and now it's the only thing he wants to drink. He's very aware of my attempts to dilute the juice, and is NOT happy about it.

He used to drink smoothies for me in the morning (not a big breakfast eater), but not in quite some time.

So tell me. As we get into summer (really, I do believe it's coming back), what will your kids be drinking? Got any good mixes to send me?

Can you Believe It?

It's the last week of classes already! (For most of you anyway... The Saturday classes hit a number of holidays, so they are meeting this weekend, and again on the 26th. Monday's class is meeting for the last time next Monday.)

Be sure to sign up for summer camps! Busy Days for babies, Creatures in My Backyard for toddlers & families, and On the Road for preschoolers. We also have a Sign & Sing class running.

Check the schedule, and send me an email soon. A couple of classes are close to capacity. The next set starts up the week of May 28th. If you decide to do it again in the height of summer, it's only $55 because you will already have the home kit! (The website says there are different curricula running in July/August - I haven't been able to get down to the office computer to change it yet! We are repeating the curricula in July/August because I can't order the others from Kindermusik International this year.)

Sarah teaches on Saturdays, and Jessica teaches on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, & Thursdays. I will be teaching on Tuesday afternoons and possibly Thursday in July/August.

Looking forward to seeing you this summer!

IMAGINE THAT! Cities Week 11

FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING

Cooperative play among the children comes into focus this week in the activity Roll That Ball. The children pair up and each pair help “lay a sidewalk” (masking tape strips) upon which they roll a ball back and forth.

With preschoolers’ developing awareness of others’ feelings, they are increasingly able to enjoy cooperative play with another child, such as today’s “sidewalk” ball play game. This is an exciting milestone for your preschooler and the Kindermusik environment is one in which his social development will continue to be nurtured, week after week, through his first years in elementary school!

IMAGINE THAT! Cities Week 9

FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING

“[T]he successful minds of the future will be those that have learned what it feels like to be in charge of themselves. They will be able to direct their own attention and come up with their own action plans.”*

Through activities such as Three Artists Matching Game and Moving Artists, your child is encouraged to offer her own ideas, to answer open-ended questions, to consider options; in other words, to come up with her own plan. It is through multi-layered activities such as this, always presented so as to be engaging for young children, that Kindermusik continues to spark learning in so many areas of your child’s life.

P.S. Remember to bring your Kindermusik Resonator Bars and Mallets to class next week.

*How to Have Intelligent and Creative Conversations With Your Kids, by Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., p.13.

IMAGINE THAT! Cities Week 8

Whew! Nothing to bring this week!

A new complex game is introduced into this week's activity There’s a Little Bell. In this activity, they must think about several different things all at one time: walking around a circle of hoops to a cue, sitting in a hoop at the end of the cue, picking up and playing an instrument while singing a song, placing the instrument on the floor, and starting the entire sequence over again. A complex activity such as this is most successful when set up by breaking it into parts and rehearsing the parts separately. By doing this, the children are able to grasp each concept introduced. We will continue to enjoy this activity for a couple more weeks, and I know that with each repetition the children will more readily recognize the pattern and begin to gain confidence and satisfaction through their continued success.

The Perils of Procrastination

For our Imagine That class on Saturday we were to make something that we might find in the city: a building, a person, an animal, etc.. We left our homework 'til Friday.

Jacob decided that he would like to make an ice cream cone (my pregnancy sweet tooth lingers on and I had taken the kids out for a cone earlier in the week). Little did I know, paper mache takes more than a few hours to harden up - especially when a 3 year old is in charge of the sloppy stuff. We tried using the hairdryer, but it didn't work.

So, we made a diorama of the aquarium instead. It's Jacob's favourite place to go in the city. A whole bunch of finger paint (and a second bath later), we have our project completed! (I didn't get the camera out in time. Today it is an empty blue box with holes on the top. It DID have aquatic creatures dangling on ribbons that one could pull up and down to make them swim. Clearly not child proof!)

Kate & Kiana brought their statues to class too. They were beautiful! Good job, girls!

PS: We used the hairdryer on the diorama too. Next time I'll look into the homework thing by Tuesday!

Summer Camps are Coming!

There are two sessions to choose from this year, including a new 2.5 hour Imagine That camp. I'm so excited!

We've got Village camps for babies (newborn - 18 months): BUSY DAYS

Our Time camps for toddlers (18 months - 3 years): CREATURES IN MY BACKYARD

Imagine That camps for preschoolers (3.5 - 5 years): ON THE ROAD

Family Time camps for families (newborn - 7 years): CREATURES IN MY BACKYARD

and Sign & Sing classes

Camps run May 28th - June 30th and July 16th - August 18th. See our SUMMER SCHEDULE online to register.

IMAGINE THAT! Cities Week 6

Listening with intention is a strong focus of this week’s class. I’m sure you recognize the importance of being able to focus on and attend to sounds—vocal and otherwise. This ability can affect our everyday life in many ways: attending to conversation, listening for directions, enjoying the sounds of nature, recognizing sounds of caution, etc.

This week we'll listen to a song in French, to the sounds a bicycle makes, and to several different city sounds. In the City Square Listening Game, we will listen to two different sounds at one time and determine what they are. You can play this listening game at home by cutting out the last page of your Family Activity Book and listening to your Home CD 1, track 24. Match the pictures to the sounds you hear!

IMAGINE THAT! Cities Week 5

FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING

This week we'll play several “stop and go” games. As you know, the concept of “stop and go” is an important one for your child to learn. The ability to control our movements is important in many situations, including walking in a big city and when we are among a large group of people. We will walk, tiptoe, and gallop to drum cues listening carefully for the “ready stop” which indicat time for us to stop our movement. You can play this game at home with your child by moving to the sounds of Home CD 1, track 10.

The introduction of a statue game reinforces the “stop and go” concept this week. Children love to “pose” and are given ample opportunity to pose as imaginative statues. We will sing Walk All Around (Home CD 1, track 22) and pose at the end of the song. This is another fun game you can play with your child at home, thus helping to solidify the learning taking place through Kindermusik!

I hope that you and your child are finding this class a meaningful and fun learning environment. If you have ideas or observations you would like to pass along to us, please feel free to send me an e-mail, give me a call, or chat with Sarah after class.

Can you hear what I hear?

Listening is such an important skill for children to acquire. Among other areas, it plays a vital role in language development, conversation skills, and academic success. When you speak, your baby probably listens intently while studying your face. Allow time for him to respond back. This will help him understand a conversation involves both listening and speaking.

In Kindermusik class, we listen to a variety of sounds and label what they are. Focused listening activities like this help children practice tuning out distractions while interpreting and understanding one sound. You can play this game at home too. Take your baby or older child on a sound scavenger hunt. What sounds can you identify? Be sure to try to mimic the sounds for some added language development.

IMAGINE THAT! Cities Week 4

FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING

I hope you and your child are enjoying the many sounds of the city through the many sounds on your Home CDs. Traffic Jammers (Home CD 1, track 2) is always a favorite of the children, sure to elicit lots of laughter. Listen for the great diversity among musical styles on the CDs. For example, jazz abounds in songs such as In the City and The Broom Man; traditional songs are heard in The Wheels on the Bus, Where Has My Little Dog Gone? and many more; and classical music tracks include Mussorgsky’s The Market Place at Limoges. These are just a few examples of the wide variety of pieces on your Home CDs. Exposure to many types of music allows your child’s appreciation for and understanding of music to grow.

IMAGINE THAT! Cities Week 3

FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING

As the children become more and more comfortable in the Kindermusik setting, I find that they are able to contribute more and more to their class experience. One of the many benefits of Kindermusik is that in a small class, your child is able to offer ideas upon which activities may be builtand developed.

This week, Hey Lolly (a silly song!) becomes even funnier as the children offer their own silly words to insert. We will sing and laugh to “Hey monkey…Hey bubbly…Hey wiggly….”

Also, the children will “find lost dogs.” Imagination abounds at this age and, when given the opportunity, the preschooler always amazes us with the many details of their own story!

P.S. Have your child bring a favorite stuffed animal to class next week.

IMAGINE THAT! Cities Week 2

FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING

“Going up…Going down…” Have you heard your child singing these phrases this week? They are part of a song we have been learning called Elevator and Escalator. As your child sings this song, he is learning about glissando, a musical effect obtained by singing (or playing) a rapid series of pitches going up or down in a continuous sliding movement. Also, as we have pretended to ride on an elevator, your child has been using his imagination to transfer real experiences (the “concrete”) into gestures (the “abstract”). This cognitive skill is one preschool-aged children are typically ready to develop, and what better way to learn than through play!

At home this week, I hope you continue to enjoy the Game Board Set. Playing the Listen and Match game will help your child (and you!) become familiar with some of the songs we will be singing throughout the semester.

P.S. Remember to bring your Kindermusik Resonator Bars and Mallets to class next week.

IMAGINE THAT! Cities Week 1

I hope you and your child left the first class of Cities! Busy Places ~ Friendly Faces as energized as I! The combination of singing, movement, instrument play, and pretend play is certainly a hit. The classroom was a busy place as they visited the pretend city—full of sights, sounds, and fun experiences.

You have taken home with you this week an array of interesting materials. I know your child will be eager to play with the new Game Board Set. For information on the Game Board, first read Family Activity #1 on page 4 of the Family Activity Book. Feel free to play any or all of the games listed. However, you might find that Picture, Picture! will help familiarize your child with the theme of this semester’s unit; it also offers the opportunity to play your new instruments, a pair of Kindermusik Resonator Bars.

Enjoy listening to your Home CDs and Sarah will see you in class next week!

P.S. Be sure to have your child bring their Kindermusik Resonator Bars and Mallets to class next time. Please label both the bars and mallets for easy identification in the classroom.

New Classes Start Next Week!

All new curricula = All new fun!

For those who may not know, Kindermusik classes run on a two year cycle. So if you've taken Village, Our Time, or Imagine That before, it's all new this time (unless you did it 2 years ago with another child!).