What's the potential of underprivileged children compared to children born to affluent families?

By the age of 4 children of professional families had heard 48 million words spoken to them and children of welfare families had heard only about 13 million words.
NPR article on talking to your child- newborn to 4

It's not only words, it's interactions and more. Is it possible to take a group of at risk babies and change their lives through a Kindermusik class that will coach the parents in how to talk and interact positively to their babies? I believe so.

Please vote for my grant idea to teach a Kindermusik class to the teen parents at the YWCA's MotherLove program. Go to this link and vote 10 x per 24 hours. There will be 5 grants awarded. I believe that by getting this class into action I will find other interested sponsors to make this project a permanent program.

I thank you......The babies thank you.

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.)

Ready for school:

Camilla counts the ringing steeple bell.

Have you noticed when children first know how to count to ten (oh, we are so proud!) they know really only the poetry of
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten!

You can tell this for sure if they point to their fingers while counting and assign 2 or more numbers per finger and skip some fingers to land on the last finger with the right number. They are missing the one-to-one ratio. So we are practicing just that right now by putting up one finger every time we sing the word EAT: I like to eat, eat, eat apples and bananas!

And how about counting with our ears? With this we are refining our listening skills. Listening is different from hearing--we hear it all and choose what to really listen to. So this week we count things we can hear like microwave beeps, telephone rings, footsteps....what will you listen to?

In music we are always counting. Eventually these young musicians will count with their ears and by feeling the patters of beats. I think this is a very special skill. We are not saying 1,2,3,4 for every measure of a concerto! (some tough measures, yes....) Someday do you think the researchers will recognize that sensing the beats and the numbers is what develops our brains in special intelligent ways? I have a hunch!

Music for the brain: Start NOW

• A 2000 Georgia Tech study indicates that a student who participates in at least one college elective music course is 4.5 times more likely to stay in college than the general student population.
  – Dr. Denise C. Gardner, Effects of Music Courses on Retention, Georgia Tech, 2000

• The part of the brain responsible for planning, foresight, and coordination is substantially larger for instrumental musicians than for the general public.
  – “Music On the Mind,” Newsweek, July 24, 2000

• A research team exploring the link between music and intelligence reports that music training - specifically piano instruction - is far superior to computer instruction in dramatically enhancing children’s abstract reasoning skills necessary for learning math and science.
  – Dr. Frances Rauscher and Dr. Gordon Shaw, Neurological Research, University of California at Irvine, February, 1997

• Physician and biologist Lewis Thomas studied the undergraduate majors of medical school applicants. He found that sixty- six percent (66%) of music majors who applied to medical school were admitted, the highest percentage of any group. Forty-four percent (44%) of biochemistry majors were admitted.
  – “The Case for Music in the Schools,” Phi Delta Kappan, 1994

• College students majoring in music achieve scores higher than students of all other majors on college reading exams.
  – Carl Hartman, “Arts May Improve Students’ Grades,” The Associated Press, October, 1999

• Music students demonstrate less test anxiety and performance anxiety than students who do not study music.
  – “College-Age Musicians Emotionally Healthier than Non-Musician Counterparts,” Houston Chronicle, 1998

• On the 1999 SAT, music students continued to outperform their non-arts peers, scoring 61 points higher on the verbal portion and 42 points higher on the math portion of the exam.
  – Steven M. Demorest and Steven J. Morrison, “Does Music Make You Smarter?,” Music Educators Journal, September, 2000

• Researchers at the University of Muenster in Germany have discovered that music lessons in childhood actually enlarge parts of the brain. An area used to analyze the pitch of a musical note is enlarged 25% in musicians compared to people who have never played an instrument. The earlier the musicians were when they started musical training, the bigger this area of the brain appears to be.
  – Pantev et al., Nature, April 23, 1998

• Research shows when a child listens to classical music the right hemisphere of the brain is activated, but when a child studies a musical instrument both left and right hemispheres of the brain “light up.” Significantly, the areas that become activated are the same areas that are involved in analytical and mathematical thinking.
  – Dee Dickinson, “Music and the Mind,” New Horizons for Learning, 1993

• The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania School District analyzed its 1997 dropout rate in terms of students’ musical experience. Students with no ensemble performance experience had a dropout rate of 7.4 percent. Students with one to two years of ensemble experience had a dropout rate of 1 percent, and those with three or more years of performance experience had a dropout rate of 0.0 percent.
  – Eleanor Chute, “Music and Art Lessons Do More Than Complement Three R’s,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 13, 1998

These quotes I found here at UAH's Music auditions webpage. It's this article: Why Study Music? by Dr. Don Bowyer and the whole page is fun to read.

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)

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

Thoughts on thinking.....

When babies are tiny we moms just do what we can. Sometimes our wise inner voice is strong enough to be heard and sometimes we just flail about, grappling for survival.

I remember my world as mom when Claire, my second baby was born. I was pretty fragile emotionally...and overwhelmed with two children! Ben was the two year old who obviously did not need as much sleep as I did! He gave up this only daytime nap on the day I brought Claire home from the hospital.

Filling my need for sleep was a challenge till I learned how to "talk" the two year old to sleep. It's a technique I developed by nearly figuring out how to talk in my sleep!

After the bedtime book was over I would turn out the light and begin the narrative...I would recite the story of Ben's day in very careful detail. I'd begin by describing what how his hair looked when he woke up and how he hopped down off the bed and his footie pyjamas would swish as he followed me down the hall...on and on and on until either he'd be sleeping or I'd end with the story about telling the story to a child who dreamed a dream....

The descriptions came from my point of view but I wove in his part of the conversations and likes and dislikes ...described the emotions (tantrums, laughter, frustrations with the new baby etc), I talked about everything because it took him so long to fall asleep.

So now I'm thinking...after reading articles on how children learn and how a vocabulary at 3 is a good predictor of a child's reading abilities in third grade, and how the brain lights up even more when THINKING words or music and how their brains light up more for "story telling" than reading a book....that my storytelling of Ben's day was creating pictures in his mind, giving him a vocabulary, and showing him an example of a stream of consciousness....maybe showing him HOW to think....

Do you think so?

In our Kindermusik classes we have the opportunity to think out loud with our children when we explore instruments. I remind parents: Label everything. Name the instrument, what's it made out of? It's shape, color, size...describe the sound it makes, name the action it takes to make the sound....Add the musical element of the day (fast, slow, high, low, loud, quiet...)Talk, talk, talk, talk......

We add "scaffolding": immitate the child's action with the instruments while doing all this talking (that's very affirming to the child) and making suggestions for extended music making (like "I see you shake your eggs. That's fast. I hear the chk, chk, chk....Can you shake them slowly, great big shakes? Yes, look at that, great big slow shakes. Your arms go up and down slowly. I hear the shakers make a steady beat. Maybe you can march your eggs......" etc.

I'd like to think they are getting an idea about how to think. After all how does a 2 year old figure out how to have "ideas"?

Interestingly I've noticed that as my children grow up through the teen years their interest in adult conversation becomes more intense. I've had 12 year old Anne at my elbow for a lot of lively political discussion lately. She's not tired of hearing me talk yet!

Your thoughts on this?
Leave a comment!
Yvette