Thursday, February 26, 2009

Wheeeee!!!! Again, again!!!!!!

I've been reminding the moms in my Kindermusik Village class that the more movement you incorporate into our activities the more the "smile-o-meter" shows you're doing it right!















And then they groan "Oh, what a WORKOUT! (Hey, getting 2 classes for the price of one!)

But I must remind everyone to BE CAREFULL!!! Do only what you CAN do. If you hurt your back swinging them around then what???? Well, then you're absolutely no fun at all, that's what!

So, as I often do on my ride home, I got to thinking about the "Take care of yourself" concept. It's been a while since I've mentioned it here at Kindermusik at the Asheville Arts Center.

Parent lecture #454889
Take care of yourself first. Here's my analogy: You are on the airplane ready for take off and the flight attendant says "If the oxygen mask drops down in front of you be sure to fasten it securely on yourself before attending to others". Ever wonder why? Ever wonder how many needy people you could supply oxygen to before passing out yourself? That's what many, many mothers are doing everyday.

Please, please take care of yourself first because:

Your baby needs a happy mom. Your baby needs a happy dad.
I, _______________________promise to take care of myself everyday.

now go do it.........


Saturday, February 21, 2009

Music for ALL.

Here is a post of mine from last April on my Kindermusik of Holland blog. Watch the video then read below for the up date!!!

Listen and watch this AMAZING story of children and music from Venezuela. This program takes children who are the poorest of the poor and puts music in their hands....puts the making of music in their hands. Music will change your life if you let it. A 17 year old juvenile delinquent said this about having a clarinet in his hand: "It's completely different than when you hold a gun."

.

What do you think would happen if we did something like this for all the preschoolers in our country? How about the children in West Michigan that are being swayed by gangs right now?(We spend more money on the penitentiary system than on higher education in our state....)

Peace,
Yvette
Thanks Lori


And here's the update:

Venezuela "Angel" makes a wish!

The creator of Venezuela's El Sistema is making headway in his wish to spread his program to all children in all of the Americas. The TED Talks (Technology, Education, and Design) has awarded Jose Abreu the prestigious TED Prize.

Listen to this orechestra, a high school orchestra ranked among the top 5 of all the orchestras in the world.

The Teresa CarreƱo Youth Orchestra contains the best high school musicians from Venezuela's life-changing music program, El Sistema. Led here by Gustavo Dudamel, they play Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10,

Thursday, February 19, 2009

What does MUSIC mean to people of our world??

My good friend Melinda has started a blog and I loved her post from today....

This is the welcome address to freshman at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory. Mr. Paulnack also was the Keynote Speaker at the Michigan Music Conference this past January in Grand Rapids, MI.
Please Read!!! This is wonderful, inspirational, noteworthy, and worth the time to read.
_____________________

One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, nd they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer I might be more appreciated than would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school she said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works. One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.

Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture why would anyone bother with music? And yet from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning. "

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless.

Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang We Shall Overcome. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does. I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects. I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier even in his 70's; it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert, and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?" Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft. You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevys. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor or physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should it together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.

" I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore,
that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let
me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way
again." --Stephen Grellet



NOW-
This speech is by the man who was the Keynote Speaker at the MMC this year!!! (Whose speech I was raving about the next day!!!!) This speech is a variation of the speech he gave that night- Isn't it amazing!?!?!?!? -I just got this in an email today!!!
I liked the MMC speech better, he expanded a lot of the points that he only mentioned in this speech... It was actually more inspirational (if that's possible...) It was directed toward music educators, and was absolutely incredible... His delivery and genuineness and passion was so apparent- there were points where I teared up! I haven’t been able to get some of the things he said out of my head since!

-At MMC he also spoke about how music was never meant to be competitive (ie- American Idol, winning seats in major symphonies...) -It was meant to bring people together! -Singing on the neighbor’s front porch on a summer afternoon, etc... -Not to market, for $, etc...

-Besides mentioning 9/11 and Messian's Quartet for the End of Time, he also talked about the musicians on the deck of Titanic.

-He mentioned the music at the Presidential Inaugruation and asked if any of us could imagine that ceremony minus the music...

-He called music an ‘inner chiropractor’ that helped us re-align, etc...

-He did not share the nursing home story...

-At Boston Conservatory, he said that when a student came to him about whether or not they should major in music, he’d ask them if they would be happy doing something else... If they could live a fulfilled, purposeful life while following a different career path... If their answer was that yes, they could-- He’d tell them not to major in music. Music is hard! To pursue it, we give up other things... We make sacrifices, but it is worth it!!!

-He talked about how music = a matter of life and death! If there was a horrific nuclear explosion and we were all going to die from radiation poisoning within 42 hours, the last thing we would hear before we died would be music...

-He talked about how music is timeless... Homo sapiens have been making music in some form for over 5000 years, but society (as we know it today with commercialism, etc...) has only existed for about the last 200 years...

-People worry about where the arts are going... Will the society of today support the arts? (Funding, ticket sales, etc?) The point he made was that society does not support the arts, but MUSIC SUPPORTS SOCIETY!!! The arts are indestructible and inextinguishable!

-He said that music and the arts are not just the ‘icing on the cake’ or the dessert we get (after the meat and potatoes- which apparently to school administrators= math, science, and English...) Music, he said, is the plate that holds all the dessert, meat, potatoes, and whatever else we consume, digest, and need to survive... Without the plate, we can’t survive. Without music we can’t survive. Music gives us the CAPACITY TO FEEL and to express what cannot be said in words. Music gives us the chance to experience and feel emotions that we couldn’t contain within ourselves/our bodies. Without music, we would emotionally explode! Music gives us the ‘capacity to contain life’, our emotions, and our expressions...

-He expanded on the idea of the musician’s job being similar to that of firefighter or rescue worker... We can’t wait for people to appreciate us as musicians and music educators. Firefighters don’t sit around pondering whether they are appreciated by society before they go rescue people!! -They break down the door and go and get them!!! Dragging them if they have to! -And that is what WE need to do!!!!!!!!!!

-He talked about saving, expanding, and re-claiming music in the schools, how we have to fight for our programs, the kids, and how important it really is...

It really was an incredible, inspiring, amazing speech!!!!

Monday, February 16, 2009

Culture....Why?

Watch this TED video of Hans Rosling looking at statistics of global society, looking at development and poverty. I was knocked off my chair by what he said towards the very end about the dimensions of development...Looking at any country's goals and the means they use to acheive their goals. He listed

human rights,
environment,
governance,
economic growth,
education,
health and
culture.

He prioritized them like this as important means to reach a society's goal:
First: economic growth
even at 2nd and 3rd place were governance and education
4th and 5th were the environment and health
last were human rights and culture.

Then he ranked them to show priority as a goal:
Last as an actual goal was economic growth, it's not really a goal at all.
then came governance and education,
4th and 3rd were environment and health
2nd was human rights and
the top goal was culture because that is what brings JOY TO LIFE.


http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

Culture

How's this for culture? How's this for joy?
What a wonderful world.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Vocabulary is a key predictor of school success

So on my post just below this I mentioned using movement as a "hook" for learning. Here's an interesting article from the BBC discussing research on gesturing for early language acquisition. I'd like them to link sign language in to this. Then maybe they could see if it really is the movement that solidifies the learning.

Here we go again gesturing with our whole body! "Tall as a tree! Wide as a house! Thin as a pin! Small as a mouse!"

I love it when the media affirms the great things we do in Kindermusik!

Gestures 'develop infant speech'

By James Morgan
Science reporter, BBC News, Chicago

A toddler points with a finger
The researchers studied 50 families from diverse backgrounds

Toddlers who use gestures more often have better vocabularies on reaching school age, US researchers say.

Children who convey more meanings with gestures at 14 months have larger vocabularies at 54 months and are thus better prepared for school, they say.

Parents and teachers could help children learn to speak by encouraging the use of gestures, say psychologists from the University of Chicago.

Their study, in Science journal, was announced at the AAAS conference.

'Hand-in-hand'

The researchers found that children from higher-income families with well-educated parents used more gestures as toddlers.

Vocabulary is a key predictor of school success and is a primary reason why children from low-income families enter school at a greater risk of failure than their peers from advantaged families
Prof Susan Goldin-Meadow

They also had higher vocabularies at school age.

"Our findings contradict the folklore," said Prof Susan Goldin-Meadow, co-author on the study.

"Your grandma always told you - if you're really articulate you shouldn't have to use your hands at all.

"That's typically what the upper class believes about itself.

"But our findings were surprising - we actually found extra gesturing in these high socio-economic status [SES] families.

"Gesture and speech go hand-in-hand.

"That's interesting and we need to explore what's happening here.

"Vocabulary is a key predictor of school success and is a primary reason why children from low-income families enter school at a greater risk of failure than their peers from advantaged families."

Pointing the way

Psychologists have long stated that families of higher income and education levels talk more with their children and speak to them in complex sentences.

But the study is one of the first to focus on whether gestures, too, have an influence on vocabulary and school preparedness.

The researchers studied 50 families from diverse economic backgrounds.

They recorded video of children with their parent, or primary caregiver, for 90-minute sessions, during ordinary home activities.

Fourteen-month-old children from high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of 24 different meanings during the 90-minute session.

Meanwhile, children from lower-income families conveyed only 13.

Once in school, students from higher-income families had a comprehension vocabulary of 117 (as measured by a standardised test), compared to 93 for children from lower-income families.

The paper does not establish a causal link between early child gesture and later child vocabulary.

But the authors suggested two possible mechanisms by which one might encourage the other.

"Child gesture could play an indirect role in word learning by eliciting timely speech from parents; for example, in response to her child's point at the doll, mother might say, 'Yes, that's a doll,' thus providing a word for the object that is the focus of the child's attention," they wrote.

The connection also may be more direct, since gestures allow children to use their hands to express meanings when they have difficulty forming words for them.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Your child's school readiness program:

Kindermusik offers children many ways to work on school readiness skills. Today we did this little poem:

Tall as a tree.
Wide as a house.
Thin as a pin and
Small as a mouse.

Our fun movements are experiential and hook the movement, words and concepts together to result in LEARNING!! We are also working on the right side of the brain with words that trigger a child to think in pictures and understand the concepts and the greater understanding of metaphors! In our society where much of "education" proper is linear we are bridging a gap that may give them the creative edge in the job market!!! Hey, I'm always thinking ahead.

Here's a TV spot with my friend Melinda (up in Michigan) and her Kindermusik studio. (click the TV)
http://lemuseumdebenatar.com/images/archives/tvhdr.jpg
Do tell your friends...let's include them in on the fun. Invite them to come visit your Kindermusik class this week.
Have fun being tall as a tree!
Yvette

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Don't Think of an Elephant!!!

Did you know that right before a baby figures out how to walk (at about 11 months old), her brain sprouts tons of new neural connections in her prefrontal lobes. Her brain is getting ready for all the exploring she will do on this new level! Shortly after there's a natural pruning that happens which clears away the excess connections that aren't being used. We seem to cringe when we hear that because I think we see potential that won't actualize. But the brain needs to streamline and get better at what we're good at rather than having too many irons in the fire....

But what I've read recently sheds new light on parenting and your baby's potential at this exciting stage of development. The prefrontal lobes is the part of the brain responsible for problem solving and creativity as opposed to the limbic system and the hind brain which take care of emotions and body functions (heart rate, breathing, digestion, aggression, etc). The limbic system is responsible for the decision to send an experience to the prefrontal lobes for thoughtful consideration OR back to the hind brain for fast action and survival. Consider this: How we discipline this toddler sets her up for how her brain will best handle situations that present themselves to her.

The average toddler hears NO!!! or receives a stern look or swat about every 9 minutes of their waking day. Those particular adult reactions to toddler behavior sends the toddler's hind brain into action. The prefrontal lobes do not get enough practice. Those new neural connections aren't being used much.

How can you say NO! without saying no? You know, when my babies were little I prayed everyday for creativity and patience. Some days I worried that God had left me all alone to deal with parenting! It's such hard work.

To further complicate matters saying "No!" just doesn't do the job it's intended to do. Here's a little experiment in communicating with the negative:

1. Don't think of an elephant.
2. What DID you think of?
3. Hey, I told you not think of an elephant!!!
4. I bet you thought of it AGAIN!!!
5. Stop thinking of an elephant!!
6. Could you do it?

Here's some suggestions on saying NO without saying no.


Tell the child what TO do.
Get the child’s attention before communicating, touch them on the shoulder or hand...
Say the child’s name.
Use a gesture, move so you get into her visual field.
Show him an object or other visual cue to get him to look at you.
Help them know what TO do.
Using your singing voice calms you and the child.
Use a prompt, hand him a tissue instead of saying “Don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve.”
Use a gesture. Gestures can guide her to appropriate behavior. Point to the coat hookinstead of “Don’t drop your coat on the floor.”
Model what you want
Offer “Let’s do it together.” That can encourage children to do things with more enthusiasm.
Call attention to the “problem”.
Say “Oh, oh” “Oops!” “Look!” Then point to what needs to be done.
Look right at his face and clearly state what you want the child to do.
Take a deep breath..... and exhale.
Save NO! for emergencies! You'll need something strong then.

And parents, take care of yourself because it's a lot easier if you're not exhausted, hungry, stressed out....etc, etc! Your baby NEEDS a happy mom and a happy dad.
Love,
Yvette
Thanks Lori B. for your post on alternatives to saying NO.
The part about the brain I got from a great author Joseph Chilton Pearce who wrote The Magical Child and The Biology of Transcendence.
I know just enough about the brain to get me in trouble...some day.... I dream about being a neuroscientist! ...and a cellist....and.....

New Class beginning Feb. 10.

Early Communication
From the moment a parent meets that little one, there is a strong desire to understand. What is he thinking? Is he hungry, tired, too cold, content? Early on every baby also has an innate desire to communicate.

In a Kindermusik Sign & Sing class (developed by Signing Smart™), we give parents the tools and knowledge to communicate with their babies using American Sign Language. Through songs and play, both parents and babies learn signs for words like “mommy” and “eat,” and as well as practical signs like “more” “milk” and when he’s “all done.” This research-proven signing class for hearing children speeds language development, eases frustration, and enhances long-term learning abilities.

Sign & Sing Unit Descriptions


Curriculum Description
Age Range: 6 months to 3 years
Class Structure: 5 or 10 classes in a semester—varies by location
Class Length: 40-50 minute class each week
Class Size: Class with no more than 12 children with parents

What A Parent And Child Experience In Class
Play, sign, and sing
Using everyday items in engaging small and large group activities, we’ll sing songs and practice the sign as we say the words, play with toys, and help the children learn both the spoken word and the sign.
Expert advice Parents will learn to spot their babies’ most “teachable moments” and the sign language teaching methods of the experts. Plus they’ll learn to recognize and respond to their children’s versions of signs.
Communication through sign language When a child is chasing a bubble or asking for the ball, make the sign for it and say the word. So a child has the ways to associate the word with the object: the child holds the ball, hears the parent say the word, and then sees the adult make the sign.

Enrollment includes:
  • Developmentally appropriate American Sign language curriculum for parents and hearing children, ages 6 months to 3 years
  • 5 to 10 week semester—varies by location
  • Weekly 40-50 minute class
  • Two sets of At Home Materials—one for each five-week theme—each includes a Family Activity Guide, DVD, and Clip-On Flashcards showing adults and children using signs
  • Over 75 sign language activities and games to play together


Unit Descriptions

Session A:Playtime and everyday items around the house—such as a ball, bubbles, and family members—are learning themes in this introduction to American Sign Language for a child and caregiver. Parents will benefit from the session's four, research-proven strategies shown to speed language development in hearing children, developed by the child development and sign language experts Signing Smart™. With the DVD's visual dictionary showing parents and children making over 60 signs, plus a pocket-sized set of flashcards of the pictures and the words of the signs, parents easily incorporate sign language into their daily routines, favorite nursery rhymes, and stories.
Home Materials: Family Activity Guide, DVD Glossary, and clip-on flashcards

Session B: This follow-up session to the first introduces more signs using animals and toys as a learning theme, and delves into a deeper understanding of the Four Keys to Signing Smart introduced during Session A. With a special focus on helping children understand signs used in different contexts, the Home Materials include a children's DVD called The Treasure Chest: Signs, Songs, and Rhymes, and features mini-music videos of children singing well-loved songs using the signs, as well as showing the printed word across the bottom of the screen—giving children multiple ways to learn the words, the sign, and the language.
Home Materials: Family Activity Guide, DVD, clip-on flashcards

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Are You With Me?

"Children have short attention spans."

Do you agree? There is a study done where the researcher rolled a ball with an 11 month old child. They rolled the ball back and forth 180 times joyfully. The child continued to roll the ball but the excitement had begun to wane. I can see where an adult would have trouble holding their attention span on task to roll a ball 180 times! Truth is if it is a child's quest to roll this ball then the attention span will be long. If it is the adgenda of the adult the child will probably roll it 3 or 4 times! This might have something to do with choice. Anytime I do something where I have little choice in the matter my attention span is minuscule! (I should be doing taxes and FAFSA right now!)

This week in our Kindermusik Village class we are suggesting families explore repetition and attention span as a home activity. The attention span will be heightened by adding slight variations. Eye contact is always paramont whenever you are interacting. Your loving eyes will keep your baby engaged joyfully!

Here's a link so you can download all the home activities for Hickory Dickory Tickle and Bounce --that's our theme right now. We are on lesson 3.

Have fun.
Yvette