Cash strapped schools make a mistake to cut music

And cash strapped families too....private lessons and classes like Kindermusik can mean the difference between a so-so musician and a musician that can really play and use their ears on a more advanced level....And can make the difference between a so-so reader and a reader who enjoys a higher academic success!

More and more research shows how music is a powerful tool for helping children reach their potential....(when I grow up I will be a neuroscientist so that I can understand all this....)

Well, someday........

But reading online about what researchers are saying happens in the brain when musicians use their ears helped me to focus the 3 1/2 year olds in our Imagine That! class this week as we are listening to layers of sound (water making waves, the bell bouy, the sea lions, and the work boat horn) and then listening to the music with the singer (the words to the song, the drum beating, the rattling percussion, the man's voice, etc) listening to many layers at once.......

"Playing an instrument may help youngsters better process speech in noisy classrooms and more accurately interpret the nuances of language that are conveyed by subtle changes in the human voice," says Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication Sciences at Northwestern University.....

Studies in Kraus' laboratory indicate that music -- a high-order cognitive process -- affects automatic processing that occurs early in the processing stream. "The brainstem, an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain, is modified by our experience with sound," says Kraus. "Now we know that music can fundamentally shape our subcortical sensory circuitry in ways that may enhance everyday tasks, including reading and listening in noise."

Read it all here.
And if you'd like to hear one of Nina Kraus' lecture click here (it's very interesting!)

Kindermusik kids now:

Anne's Michigan friend Eleanor (who was a Kindermusik student for many years) in a letter to Anne: "I am doing orchestra in school. It's really easy and the teacher uses me for examples. Are you in orchestra?"

Orchestra is one of Anne's favorite activities each week.

Talk, talk, talk........17,000 words minumum

A child’s rate of vocabulary growth, vocabulary use, and IQ score was more strongly related to the number of words a parent said per hour than any other
variable including parents’ education or socioeconomic status.

Try for speaking 30,000 words a day to your newborn to 4 year old. It's worth it!

Click to watch this video link: Introduction by Todd Risley, Ph.D.

Filling life up with words is where vocabulary comes from and starting early is critical, according to Todd Risely Ph.D., co-author Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.

The Power of Talk is a document published online about the research of the LENA (Language Environment Analysis) Foundation. Here's a quote:

They determined that a child’s intellectual success later in life is directly related to the amount of talk the child hears from birth to age three. Research conducted by the LENA Foundation using the LENA System has indeed confirmed many of their important findings.

Key findings to date include:
• Parents of advanced children—children who scored consistently between the 90th and 99th percentiles on independent standard language assessments—spoke substantially more to those children than did parents of children who were not as advanced, confirming the Hart and Risley results.
• Parents estimated that they talked more with their children than they actually did.
• Most language training for children came from mothers, with mothers accounting for 75 percent of total talk in the child’s environment.
• Mothers talked roughly 9 percent more to their daughters than to their sons.
• Parents talked more to their first-born than to their other children, particularly first-born males.
• Most adult talk in the child’s environment occurred in the late afternoon and early evening compared to other times of day.
• Children of talkative parents were also talkative.
• Although the average daily talk for parents who graduated from college was higher than for all other parents, the average daily talk for the upper 50 percent of parents who did not complete high school was significantly higher than that of the lower 50 percent of parents who graduated from college.
• The more television time in a child’s day, the lower his or her language ability scores tended to be.
• Monolingual Spanish-speaking families were similar to English-speaking families with respect to patterns of adult talk.
• Parents of children with autism tended to talk less the more severe their child’s symptoms were. Conversely, the stronger their child’s language abilities, the more they talked.
• Parents are quite variable in the day to day amount they talk to their children, but given the opportunity to receive feedback they are able to increase the amount of talk consistently.

Meet The Harmonica Man

Music gives when you give it away. I know there are lots of toddlers with harmonicas now....when are you going to start playing in the checkout lane of the grocery store?

Music and Language and Emotions and the Brain

The other day I had a chance to sit for a while when things were quiet and listen to this radio program from WYNC's Radio Lab. It was a very interesting and even entertaining program. I really do want to know more about how the ear "hears"...how our brains get the message!

Really it was so fascinating that I listened twice to the segments about how babies are attuned to pitches as infants and how in societies with tonal languages (languages like Mandarin Chinese) it is more likely a child will grow up with perfect pitch compared to a language (like English) which is not tone specific. (Many many great composers had perfect pitch.) But that we do teach babies certain vocal inflections as part of communication and some of that is common around the world.

Also I enjoyed the segment about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring which some call the most important music written in the last century. I followed up the radio program by listening to my daughter's orchestra at the Conservatory at Lawrence University as they played a fantastic concert of mostly Stravinsky pieces!
A great evening!

(This picture is actually from the November concert with the LSO choirs. Also a really great concert.)

I play loud sounds on my drum!

Brady plays LOUD sounds on the snare drum. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.
There's a pattern here...and that's related to math.

We explore the snares. You can make quiet sounds by touching the snares.

Pulling down the "ears" of the big marching drum. This drum is a revolutionary war replica. I used to have a fife and drum corps when I lived in Maryland...way back when....



LOUD SOUNDS BOOM!
Quiet sounds tap.

Playing the Glockenspiel!

Here's pictures from my Kindermusik Young Child 2 class from the South Asheville Arts Center location in Arden.

We singing, playing and reading the notes "C" and "A" and this week our new note "D"!
Above you see Madison, Alexander and Thomas. They look great. You should hear them!