subject: Skills Your Child Will Develop From Singing And Dancing Activities [print this page] With more complex games (like Hoop Walk), it is important to break down the activity into parts which can be rehearsed by the children before integrating these parts into a whole. Though the repetition of these parts, children:
- Learn from watching each other
- Feel an increased sense of competency
- Begin to recognize patterns and consistency and establish continuity
- Learn that perseverance can lead to improvement and increased success
- Feel personal satisfaction when they being to be able to do something well.
Repetition is important to children's singing success.When you first introduce songs to young children, they will probably not sing every word or follow every phrase. By the time you have sung it several times, your children will begin to pick up the lyrics and melody and say, "Let's sing it again."
When children distinguish between a prominent (foreground) sound and background sounds, they are practicing analytical listening.Analytical listening requires children to:
- Evaluate what is heard and comprehended
- Contemplate and reflect
- Weigh new information against what is already known
- Discuss, share thoughts, opinions and viewpoints
Activities in which children move or dance with a partner offer them many social, physical and cognitive tools to help them discover themselves through interacting with others.Through these activities children:
- Learn to evaluate social interactions
- Use cooperation skills
- Practice self-control
- Learn to be good listeners
- Develop spatial awareness
- Interact and reciprocally contribute to each other's growth process.
One of the things we have been doing in class is tying in counting skills with our music experiences.The children have counted how many times they sang the word "eat" in Apples and Bananas, and today we counted how many tolls of a bell they heard. Children can begin counting as young as 2 years of age.However there is a difference between the act of counting that is a rote activity and the act of counting when one-to-one correspondence is understood.One-to-one correspondence is the ability to assign and understand that each number counted corresponds with an object.This is an important concept because it is the basis for understanding mathematics.
In class we used finger counting to reinforce one-to-one correspondence skills.Finger counting works well because it is a concrete experience that is both physical and visual, so it easily demonstrates the relationship of numbers from 1 to 10 to objects or sounds being counted.
