Whole Child Development
As I work on some projects for the future, here’s a post from the past, originally posted in March of 2009.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “Music is the universal language of mankind.” It is a transcendent medium, one that takes on a variety of forms to meet the intrinsic needs of each person. It is enlivening and motivating. This we can all agree on. What has been debated in recent decades is the relationship of music to learning.
I am a fan of great children’s music artists. Hap Palmer and Raffi are a delightful mixture of musical and educational genius! And so I hope you won’t get me wrong when I say that I don’t think that’s the only kind of music children should listen to.
Here’s a quick, easy, and inexpensive way (music to a teacher’s ears, right?) to create a great tool for incorporating music and auditory discernment. Whoa, back up the truck, what was that? “Auditory discernment” is the ability to hear the differences and similarities between two sounds. It can be as simple as hearing the difference between a bell ringing and a horn honking, but it’s also the groundwork for hearing the difference between the sounds in words, like the short e sound and the short i sound. Phonemic awareness is a critical reading skill, and it is completely auditory. So building auditory skills actually paves the way for reading skills. OK, so back to the project at hand!
I try to fit a nursery rhyme, fable, or fairy tale into each unit. As I’ve mentioned before, these are the literary classics of childhood! When talking about the arts and the senses, I like to introduce the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin!
You can check out a book to read out loud, create a flannel board story, or use the coloring pages from this website. Whatever your method, get familiar with the story and bring it to life in your storytelling. After the story, talk about whether or not the children think it could really happen. Probably not….at least not exactly (though the story’s historical roots are actually debated). Nonetheless, listening to music can make us want to move in different ways, depending upon the way it sounds. Play a few samples and have the children suggest what type of movement the music makes them think of. Choose samples that remind you of a lullaby, a dancing tune, a quiet tip-toe song, etc. End with a march and have the children march, parade style, to your next activity!
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has always been one of my favorite musical works. This program music is so beautiful and powerful, but also so descriptive, you can literally see in your mind and feel in your bones what Vivaldi is trying to describe with his music. (And if you aren’t sure what he’s trying to describe, check out these sonnets Vivaldi wrote to correspond with his music.) Because the music is so suggestive of movement, it’s perfect for a music and movement activity with children!
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has always been one of my favorite musical works. This program music is so beautiful and powerful, but also so descriptive, you can literally see in your mind and feel in your bones what Vivaldi is trying to describe with his music. (And if you aren’t sure what he’s trying to describe, check out these sonnets Vivaldi wrote to correspond with his music.) Because the music is so suggestive of movement, it’s perfect for a music and movement activity with children!
Laurie Berkner has a great monster song that just compels your little monsters to get up and dance! You can download Monster Boogie on iTunes, and you can listen to it with a little animated video on YouTube here. One of the great things about Laurie Berkner’s music is that you almost instinctively know how to dance to it just from the elements she uses. At the beginning, the music is staccato, and so we march with our scariest monster faces. Then during the boogie/wiggle chorus, we dance and wiggle as only a silly monster would. Often the roar at the end is the favorite part! Music and movement activities are great for transitioning, building large motor skills, as well as enjoying the creative and interpretive aspects of music. As an extension, you can have the children create drawings of a monster party with all their favorite monster characters boogying down!
For more favorite fall activities, click here!
I love Laurie Berkner’smusic! She is one of those artists who really knows music and really knows kids. Her music is fun and I don’t find it patronizing or grating like I do with some other children’s music. If you haven’t found her treasure trove of music yet, you should stop everything and go to iTunes now. Or at least after you finish reading this post!
One of my many favorite Laurie Berkner songs is, “We are the Dinosaurs”. It’s a great song and perfect for the kiddos to dance to. They really just naturally dance to act out the story in the song. It starts at a heavy dinosaur march, and then switches to a lighter, quicker tune as you stop to eat and then again to rest. In addition to being a fun song to sing and to dance to, it is great for exposing the children to a musical change in mood, as the music alternates between staccato and legato. This is a great activity for fostering creativity as well as developing music and movement skills. So now you can dance on over to iTunes and download this song. I guarantee your children will get more than one dollar’s worth of use out of it!
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