Moving to Learn

I love reading articles and research about how we learn and how the brain works and develops.  I saw this article below and just had to share it.

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/03/26/why-kids-need-to-move-touch-and-experience-to-learn/

The article really stresses that children retain more knowledge if they move and connect actions and movements to their learning .

As a music therapist, I strive to find ways to incorporate many different movements within songs I sing with students.  We count with our fingers, we incorporate sign language for certain vocabulary words, we move to the music and we pat the beat on various parts of our body to stay together and engaged.

I think this research is right on the money!  Children and adults of all ages learn more when movement is combined with new content and information.
What do you think?

St. Patrick's Day Song Post

Welcome back!
While planning sessions over the weekend, I went back into my collection of holiday songs to find a song for St. Patrick's Day.  I love singing about the holidays within our monthly calendar song with the students.   I also write a separate song for most holidays so that we can focus on what those particular holidays represent.
So today's song share is about St. Patrick's Day.  In this song, I was sure to include the color green, leprechauns, shamrocks,  four leaf clovers and  rainbows.
The song is below.  If you would like a song sheet with lyrics and guitar chords for this song, send an email to morewithmusic@gmail.com.

Have an awesome week and don't forget to wear something green!

Rosie's Walk

Today's song post is about a children's book called Rosie's Walk.
This book was written by Pat Hutchins.
I adore this book for it's simplicity, colorful illustrations and use of positional words.

Rosie's Walk is about a hen, named Rosie, and a fox, who is following Rosie around the farm all day. The students enjoy looking at the illustrations in this book as they show what happens to the fox as he follows Rosie all day. The positional words mentioned in this book are: on, across, around, over, past, through and under.



I incorporated this book in several music therapy sessions recently.
After singing through the book and showing the pictures, I added signs for the positional words mentioned in the story.  The students loved this story.  They were curious to see if the fox would catch Rosie and many of them predicted at the beginning of the story that the fox "would eat Rosie".  You'll have to check this book out to find out what really happens.  :)

As always, thanks for stopping by.  Stay tuned for more posts!