Beat Acquisition: Help your children learn to find and move to the beat.  Clapping to the beat, patting the beat on your legs, and moving to the beat are all different skills.  Children will learn to find the beat faster if you pat it on their back or sway with them to the beat.  You want their whole body, not just their hands to feel the beat. Be patient, it can take a long time to learn to keep a steady beat.  Most children learn to keep a steady beat somewhere between the ages of 4 and 7.  Beat acquisition is a great asset in athletic pursuits. It is part of body-kinesthetic and spatial learning. Most all learning involves patterns and you have to understand beat before you can see a pattern.  Import learning pathways are laid in the brain as a child learns to feel and move to a steady beat.  

Using musical play to enhance your child’s development!

Inner Hearing: Inner hearing is an important part of musicianship.  A musician needs to be able to hear, in his head, what a song and note should sound like without actually singing or playing.   Inner Hearing is a skill that takes time and practice to develop.  Play games where you and your children only sing certain words in a song and see if you can stay together. (Songs like Bingo)  You can choose to sing whole songs in your head except a few key words to see if your staying together. This is a great activity to keep you all entertained in the car.  If you sing quietly you can even use the activity in the grocery store line and the doctors office. While participating in this activity, your children are also learning self-control. You must be able to hear songs in your head to sing rounds and sing harmony.  Start with rhythm rounds where you each clap different rhythms and progress to singing rounds.   

Pictures!

We just finished our ZOO TRAIN unit and ADVENTURES AROUND THE WORLD!  Here are a few photo highlights.  To see all the photos I've taken click Here.  The username is kindermusikmm and the password is imagineartsstudio.

This summer my blog will feature 8 ways you can use musical play to enhance your child’s development! 

Singing:  The first instrument a child can master is his or her own voice.  It is through singing that children develop their sense of pitch.  Be careful having children sing songs with jazzed up accompaniments.  A young child’s untrained ear has a hard time knowing which, of the many pitches they are hearing, is the right pitch to sing.  Stick to simple folk songs with simple accompaniments for singing.  Singing acapella is wonderful.  Sing books to your children.  To help strengthen the coordination between the brain hemispheres have your children make up their own words to songs, try to vary the tempo and dynamics of your singing.  Help your child learn to color their language by conveying emotion through how they sing. Explore singing loud, soft, happy, sad, etc.  You can also help them build their musical vocabulary by using words like forte and pianissimo, rather than loud and soft, or legato and staccato in place of smooth and bumpy.  When they are angry or excited see if you can get them to sing their emotions to you.  You can try it too.  It's a great way to help diffuse anger or frustration and help improve communicate.  When my children were younger, I found that singing instructions or directions really made them stop and listen to what I was saying. 

This summer my blog will feature 8 ways you can use musical play to enhance your child’s development! 

Sound Discrimination:  Hearing and listening are not the same thing.  Active focused listening is a skill that benefits children in many ways.  A good listener follows instructions better, develops reading and math skills more easily, and has enhanced social understanding.  We can help our children learn to be better listeners by practicing listening.  Play games where children focus on all the sounds around them.  Instead of playing “I SPY” play I “HEAR”. You’ll be surprised at all the different sounds going on around you.  This is a great game for the car or standing in line at the grocery store.  Here is a link for sound bingo game that you can use at home to help your children learn to listen.  For your sound bingo game click HERE.

The Magic of Music Week 15 FOL

I've so enjoyed our Kindermusik semester and will miss all of you with my move to Katy, Texas. Continue to make music a daily part of your child's life. The processes of making music enhances your child's development. Musical play engages all the different learning centers your in child’s brain. As these center work together making music the the pathways and connections between these sections of the brain and the brain hemispheres are strengthened. Strong connections make it easier your child to think, reason, and learn. Making music also helps your child develop socially and emotionally. Music gives them another avenue to experience, explore, and express emotion. Making music, especially in a group, requires a child to learn self-control, cooperation, and other important social skills! But the greatest thing about musical play is it's fun and helps create wonderful childhood memories. One of the greatest compliments I ever received was from my daughter when she returned from college one summer. She said to me, "Mom, as I talk to other people about there childhood I realize what a gift you gave me with all the singing and dancing we did at home. The way you used music in our home made my childhood magical." Keep your home full of the magic of music! (Thanks for the pictures Christina!)

Fun Music Site!

Just found a wonderful internet site. This site gives pictures of all the orchestra instruments and recordings of the sound each instrument makes. It would be fun to explore with your children. http://www.musictechteacher.com/quiz_help_instrument.htm