This week’s class was a good mix of concept review (Note Name Review, rhythm review) and concept introduction.
Also, we performed a “Hop, Old Squirrel” 3-part ensemble today. What an accomplishment! Good ensemble playing requires a great deal of focus and concentration. This group of children has certainly matured in their ability to work together. It is a pleasure for me to see (and hear) what they are able to achieve!
We continue with a lot of Active Listening (differentiating between hearing and listening) in our Imagine That! classes. “Hearing” and “Listening” are quite different. Hearing is a process involving nerves and muscles that reach adult efficiency by age four to five. Listening is a learned behavior, a mental process that is concerned with hearing, attending, discriminating, understanding, and remembering. It can be improved with practice. Listening affects social interactions, one’s level of functioning, and perhaps one’s overall success in life.
The At-Home Kindermusik CDs are created with several goals in mind. One of these goals is to introduce your child to a variety of musical styles. This week, while we all listened to “storm music” (an excerpt from the Allegro “Storm” movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Op. 68 in F Major, the Pastoral Symphony), the children made “storm drawings.”
We were transferring our whole body movements of dancing to and creating wind and storm music to controlled hand and finger movements.
We had so much fun this week in Our Time! The kids are getting much more comfortable in class and this week I saw a lot more participation and sociability.
“Ding dong! Knock, knock!” “Listening” in Kindermusik class comes in many forms. We listen to each other, we listen to music as we rock and dance, and we listen and talk about specific identified sounds.
“Active Listening” differs from hearing in that it is an intentional act. While we are surrounded by sounds in our everyday life, we choose whether or not to listen and process the sounds we hear. “Active Listening” is an important part of the Kindermusik curricula because it offers children the opportunity to learn to listen with intention.
We had a lot of fun playing. Play is a natural self-motivated activity for children. The value of lay is that it provides freedom from evaluation and judgement. The freedom of a playful atmosphere fosters intellectual development as well as self-construction and the development of personality.
The Vestibular System:
“The vestibular system is sometimes considered a sixth sense, because it’s integration with all other sensory systems is key to learning. It is the main organizer of all sensory input. Yes, it helps with balance and coordination, but it also gives us a sense of ourselves in our environment, giving us physical and emotional security. A healthy vestibular system helps us to understand visual information and helps us fix our eyes as the rest of us moves. It helps us stay upright against the pull of gravity. Because the vestibular system and the inner ear are attached, our vestibular system and our auditory system work together. Research also shows that stimulating the vestibular system (movement) can encourage a child to make spontaneous sounds, resulting in the advancement of speech. It opens up the brain to learning because it organizes the information for every other sense--proprioceptive (muscle & joint), auditory, visual, tactile, taste and smell. Using all your senses will really open up your brain to learn!” ~Leslie Waddell
Movements that move the head off center and stimulate the vestibular system include rolling, tipping, swinging, swaying, turning, and twisting.
We learned about long and short by shaking our eggs in long and short ways, and by making long and short steps.
At home this week, remember to read Family Activity #9 for ideas of ways to include more movement into your daily routines with The Windy Rock, The Family Rock and other rocking activities.
We moved like the wind 
The children are very excited about learning to “write” rhythms—and will likely be quite enthusiastic about showing you how to do it! Be sure to find a few minutes this week to “practice”—encouraging your child to attempt both dictating and “writing.”
and had some fun with them in class:
Today, as in every lesson, the children participated in a Focused Listening activity. This week’s Focused Listening featured various folk instruments—the fiddle (or the fiddle style of playing the violin), the guitar, and the banjo. After listening, we discussed the similarities and differences among the instruments’ sounds.
Research has shown that early experiences with careful, analytical listening can dramatically improve auditory processing, listening comprehension, and in turn, reading ability. Reading is directly related to listening in that a successful reader must be able to relate the words on the page to sounds—internalizing and remembering them long enough to understand what has just been read.
