Miss Mindy’s January Music Note
The Value of Finger Plays and Nursery Rhymes!
For most children handwriting is synonymous with torture. The handwriting of today’s children and youth is barely legible. Research indicates that this is caused not only by a lack of emphasis on handwriting but also because the way young children use their hands now is very different than 50 to 100 years ago. In generations past children, even toddlers, used their hands to work. The day was full of work demanding the use of the hands: sewing, scrubbing, hammering, chopping, picking, kneed dough, etc. They developed hand coordination and muscles tone that today’s push button electronics children just don’t have.
In the past when children learned to write they already had the fine motor skills and muscle tone required to write neatly, all they had to learn was how to shape the letters. Today children have to develop the fine motor skills and hand muscles needed to write while learning to form the letters. This puts their brains on overload and in some cases children simple don’t have the coordination and muscles needed for writing! Writing truly is a torturous process for them.
Finger plays and Nursery rhymes allow children to use their hands and develop the coordination and muscles that will help them write. Using basic sign language also gets fingers moving. Another way to get children using their hands is have them do simple jobs around the house. Give them a scrub brush, a towel, and a small bucket of water. Have them scrub and wipe an area of the kitchen floor. It will keep them busy, get them using their hands, and you’ll have one area of your kitchen floor clean!
Another great value of nursery rhymes and finger plays is that they RHYME. Infants' and young children’s phonological awareness is accelerated in an environment rich with rhyming and rhythmic speech. Phonetic sound discrimination is the first step in learning to speak and a vital pre-literacy skill. When a child hears the same phonetic sounds spoken close together it enhances the brains ability to identify and record that particular and unique sound. I’ll be talking more about phonological awareness in February’s music note.
Resources
Local libraries have a large supply of nursery rhyme and finger play books, CD’s and DVD’s.
“Mainly Mother Goose” by Sharon, Louis, & Bram, is one of my all time favorite children’s CDs. You can listen to the CD at: http://www.rhapsody.com/sh
