Winter Blues?
Sing and dance them away!
Did you know, like exercise, singing and dancing releases endorphins which are a natural mood booster? So if the winter blahs are getting you down, turn on your favorite playlist and sing and dance them away.
Pre-K Music Makers
There is a difference between rhythm and beat in music. In our music classes, we work on both. We work on keeping a steady beat while we play or sing a song. We practice feeling macro and micro beats (or big and little beats as I sometimes say to the children) in various time signatures, duple, triple, and asymmetric. We isolate rhythm patterns separately from the songs. Feeling the beat and keeping a steady beat is a developmental music skill that we work on week to week. Check out our Red Drum video below and you will notice that we play with the beat, switching from macro and micro. After chanting Red Drum and playing the sticks, we isolate the rhythm patterns from the chant separately.
Nursery Music Makers
This week the children have been having fun with several songs in the Drum Collection. They love playing the sticks with There's a Cobbler and we played the large gathering drum with Drum and Sing. Sailing Song with the scarf canopy was another favorite. Check out our video below. We used the scarf to accentuate the phrases and form of the music with different movements. We also worked on our rhythm and coordination by moving to the beat and alternating right and left feet and turning clockwise and counter clockwise to the music. Plus it was a whole lot of fun!
Music Together at Home
As you are listening to your Music Together CDs at home, have you noticed there are songs without words in the Fiddle and Drum Collections? Each Music Together collection features a few songs without words. These are an important part of the Music Together curriculum. Growing children are instinctively wired to learn language- so much so that even songs can become primary language experiences for them. By using nonsense syllables or "vocables" instead of words, we allow children to have a more purely musical experience without having to process language. The children are able to focus on the musical elements of the song. Have fun with these songs at home and make up your own nonsense syllables to sing along.
