Family Time/Movin’ & Groovin’/Week 7 (Weight)
Dear Families,
Our movement focus for Lessons 7 and 8 is weight. The more muscles we use, the stronger the force of our movement, and vice versa. Working with contrasts in weight, light and heavy movements, teaches children to control and understand the impact of their movement. When we move to music, we sometimes want to dance more strongly to loud music and more lightly to quiet music, though there is not a direct correlation. When you explore light and heavy movements at home this week, make this distinction for your children: you can move with strong or heavy motions either slow or fast, and the same is true for light motions. Consider that you can make a loud sound with a light movement by striking a triangle or a wind chime, while punching a padded pillow will produce a quiet sound.
Don't get too "weighted" down this week! Have fun exploring!
Kindermusik’s Foundations of Learning - some of the benefits your child received from today’s activities are:
Contrast: Children enjoy learning within the context of contrast, as it is one of the primary tasks of their preschool year. Understanding contrasting concepts is a significant aspect of cognitive development. The capacity to learn relationships between ideas and then apply the learned information to other situations is highly related to a child’s success in school (Johnson-Martin, Nancy, Susan Attermeier, and Bonnie Hacker. 1990).
Becoming a Good Listener: Focusing on one sense at a time helps children strengthen their perception. Focusing on sound, for example, sharpens listening skills. Experts say about two-thirds of everything learned is learned through listening, yet “the average person only remembers about twenty-five percent of what he or she hears, and some people remember as little as ten percent…while hearing is incredibly easy, listening takes real effort.” When children listen to isolated sounds, they enhance their skills in focus and attention, allowing them to understand and interpret more of what they hear (adapted from Amberg, Jay. 1993).
Hearing Patterns: When children drum along to the rhythms in a song or to their own name, they practice careful listening and pattern recognition. This is one way children hear sounds in words – a skill necessary for word recognition, speaking, reading,, and writing (adapted from “ Show and Tell”).
