Dear Families,
I had a wonderful time watching all of your children transform into elephants during class! I know you’ll enjoy listening and moving to “The Elephant Stomp” on your home CD. Your little ones will enjoy making elephant sounds, looking at pictures of elephants and moving like elephants. The Elephant Stomp will cultivate an important new skill in your older child - empathy for others in their ever expanding world. Did you know that one of the best ways to foster empathy for others is through relationships with animals, both real and imagined? Children want to run like deer, slither on the ground like snakes, to be clever as foxes, quick like bunnies and heavy like elephants.*
Here’s a fun activity for your family, which reinforces the concept of weight.
Let’s make a shaker! All you need is an empty, plastic bottle and some blocks (large enough to avoid choking). Your children will enjoy working together to fill your container. The more blocks you put into the container, the heavier the shaker will become, however, you’ll notice that the sound becomes quieter as the container fills. The shaker will sound louder with fewer blocks, even though it feels light.
*adapted from David Sobel’s “Beyond Ecophobia” in the Winter, 1999 edition of Education for Life
Kindermusik’s Foundations of Learning - some of the benefits your child received from today’s activities are:
Creativity:
Repeating an activity in a new way gives families permission to be creative and find new ways to experience the same music. To provide a creative climate, be sure to allow sufficient time, space, materials, and opportunity (Edwards, Carolyn Pope and Kay Wright Springate. 1995).
Scaffolding
Scaffolding is defined as the process by which an expert provides temporary support to a learner to “help bridge the gap between what [the learner] know[s] and can do and what [he or she] need[s] to accomplish in order to succeed at a particular learning task” (p. 169). Upon completion of this task, a learner is better able to make the connection between prior knowledge and new information. Scaffolding allows the caregiver to interact directly with the child while modeling direction and purpose, simultaneously providing information and setting expectations to help the child discover the information he or she needs to successfully complete a task (Graves, M.F. and S. Braaten. 1996).
Cultivating Empathy
Empathy between children and the world is a main developmental objective for preschool children. They don’t differentiate between themselves and others. Cultivating relationships with animals, both real and imagined, is one of the best ways to foster empathy during early childhood. Children want to run like deer, to slither along the ground like snakes, to be clever as foxes, and quick like bunnies (adapted from Sobel, David. 1999).
Dyad PlayResearch suggests that when a toddler is engaged in free play with an older child, her pretend play becomes both more frequent and more complex. Mixed-age play also offers a number of benefits for older children, including enhancing social-emotional development and communicative behaviors. “It seems the efficacy of the dyad may be increased if the older play partner is familiar to, and perhaps a regular play partner of, the younger child” (Kowlaski, Dr. Helen. 2002).
