When to Leave the Playlist ...
Yesterday, I traveled to a preschool to teach a music class. It was an interesting setting. The preschool is housed in a high school in a working class city, and high school students (always girls) work with the preschoolers for credit, supervised by an experienced teacher. I was a guest come in to teach a music segment.
Of course, I brought my playlist.
More and more, I’ve been structuring my music classes around types of movement. Music is the medium, of course, but these days, kids seem to move less and less – even preschoolers are parked in front of media devices! So my goal is to stretch their movement repertoire as much as I can, and pick up a few of the potentially dropped stitches of movement development.
Song 1: Jambo. I began with about a dozen 3-or-so year olds seated on a rug with alphabet letters. I started with my favorite movement: Slap, Clap! And my favorite opening song: Jambo. These kids were either shy or not used to singing; there was no spontaneous call and response. So I sang all the parts with them, encouraging them along. It also gave me a chance to begin to learn the names on the stickers on their sweaters.
Song 1: Well, Well, Where’s Your Turtle Shell? I used to go right into getting up and walking after Jambo. But now I like to do Well, Well, Where’s Your Turtle Shell? from Rappin’ on the Reflexes.It helps bring kids into their core muscles, so that when they get up and walk, they are less likely to have arms and legs flailing. It also, incidentally, helps to integrate the Moro Reflex. It can be useful to smooth out any potential emotional reactivity before the class gets rolling too far!
I began by being a “turtle” in the middle of the floor. “Where’s my shell? Come touch it!” I invited the kids. They all came up and gingerly my back (this was exciting, the teacher was lower down than they were! and they could touch her!) “Now, find your own turtle shell!” I told them. We touched our shoulders, and our hips, and then went through the rap very slowly. (On the CD, it’s a lightning response game! But for young children, you slow it down, and have them touch their shoulders and hips as they push them in and out).
Song 3: Drum Walk. Now, get up and walk! This is a basic Dalcroze activity (but you’ll find some version of it in almost every method). Children walk to the beat of the drum: “regular” (beat). Silence: freeze. Walk, walk, walk, walk . . . then twice as fast, and then twice as slow. For us, the regular beat was “people,” the fast was “little mice,” and the slow was “giants.”
Song 4: Four-Sided Feet. Time to integrate another reflex! This time, it’s the Babinski Reflex, which is key for walking in a balanced, grounded way. Again, we slow it way down from the Rappin’ on the Reflexes version.
Sitting in the circle, I invite the kids to stick their feet out. We touch the outsides of our feet (shoes off, of course), and stroke around to the insides. Then we touch heel and toe. When we’re quite sure of where all these places on our feet are, we stand up and balance. “Outside!” we walk on the sides of our feet to my voice calling out the beat, “Walk, walk, walk and walk! Inside! Walk, walk, walk and walk . . “ We walk on all four sides of our feet, and then on our whole feet, too!
Song 5: Coyote Vowels. Time to sit and sing again. We’ll work on vowel sounds and breath, again from Rappin’ on the Reflexes. “How many of you know what a coyote is?” Once this is established, we hear some howls . . . and then we discover that coyotes use all kinds of sounds when they howl! We open our mouths for the AH sound, and then make a big circle for the OH sound, and then pucker for the OO sound . . . Then we open up for AH again, close a little for EH, and smile for EE . . . and then we have a coyote chorus! We learn about solos, duets and trios as different ensembles of coyotes strut their stuff.
Song 6: Elevator. Now that we’ve got our voices howling up and down, we can put some pitches to them. (Elevator follows Coyote Vowels inRappin’ on the Reflexes for just this reason). We stand up and make an elevator of sound, with the “resting” tone in the middle. This song allows different children to direct the “elevator” sounds with their hands – and they get to see the other children following along with their own hands and voices. Power!
Song 7: Not!I begin the next song on my playlist – Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star with rocking motions . . . but suddenly a bunch of kids are on their tummies on the rug. This could be considered a discipline problem. But for me, it’s a gift. The children are showing me what kinds of movement they need next for their own integration process. My job is to organize it.
So we switch to I Am a Lizard, again from Rappin’. They get to crawl on their bellies and then stick their tongues out to catch flies – and integrate some early uterine reflexes at the same time.
It makes sense, from a developmental standpoint – we did lots of walking already, which is cutting edge stuff. Maybe some of these kids didn’t get to spend enough time on their bellies as babies. And, even if they did, they may need to do it some more now, to help absorb all the other things we’ve been learning.
Time to end this post . . . but not the class! We’ll continue with the rest of play list next week.
Robin Geselowitz Feb 20, 2012
Hi Eve,
I love what you do with movement and music. Let me know if your ever interested in coming out to West Hollywood to give our Early Childhood teachers a workshop? Hope to see you this summer at ECMMA.
Regards,
Robin