Family Literacy Day

Every year on this day, January 27, Canada celebrates Family Literacy Day within the family and your community by helping to organize events within our schools, libraries, literary organizations and most importantly, your home.
Literacy is something that can and should be encouraged and practiced right from infant on. In each of our Kindermusik classes, we have a strong focus on literacy and understand how important it is to the development of a child in so many more ways than one. It has been proven to improve their ability to actively listen, build on their vocabulary, develop an appreciation of our language syntax, and create print awareness where they understand that letters come together to form words and ideas.
The ABC Life Literacy Canada site has wonderful ideas to celebrate books and literacy. I encourage you to check it out and find your own fun activity to do together with your children today to promote their own literacy.

Kindermusik Parenting Through Music: Part 3

Spotlight on Learning: Village

Lifting. Squatting. Twirling. Bending. Whew! Sometimes Kindermusik class feels more like a workout than, well, a workout. Okay, maybe not P90x, but still! While you are building muscles each week, your child is building early language skills.

When you lift her high "up, up in the sky" or "twirl around like a leaf" while singing the songs in class, you help your little one learn the word and understand the concept. Pre-readers rely almost exclusively on what they hear in order to acquire language. Your child's brain makes a connection based on what she experiences (being lifted high or twirling around) and hears ("up" or "twirl"). Later, she will discover those words correspond to marks on a page which eventually leads to letter recognition and reading. Just think how toned your arms will be then!

Everyday connection: Play that fun-key music. Listen and move to music that combines key vocabulary with a movement or activity. "Up, Up In The Sky" and "Like a Leaf or a Feather" are familiar choices. Visit play.kindermusik.com for more favorites, like "I Roll the Ball to You." Try mixing in your tunes, too. "Dancing Queen" anyone?

Our Babies and their Brains

    Neuroscience has made some truly amazing discoveries in our recent history. One of the most interesting areas of study is that of  brain development of babies and young children. It used to be the common belief that children were all born as empty slates and it was up to us as parents and teachers to "fill them up". Recent study is beginning to teach us otherwise.
    Essentially, each of our brains are filled with networks of connections somewhat like a connect-the-dot picture, called neural pathways. Our babies are all born with the basic grid to get them started with a spattering of  neurons and synapses already developing. By 8 months of age, according to an article called "Starting Smart", a baby could have 1,000 trillion synapses in his brain! Isn't that mind-blowing! At this point, there are literally endless possibilities for what your baby is capable of learning.
    Of course, this doesn't stay this way. The brain will begin to prune whichever synapses and neural pathways that are not being used as a means of strengthening the pathways that have already been established. Vision and visual comprehension, for example, is one of the very first senses that get "hard-wired" into our brains. If a new baby has a visual abnormality, the longer it takes to address and correct the problem the higher the chance that the child may never fully recover. Or if a child has a speech impediment, if not corrected by around 4 years of age, their brain starts to loose the ability to correct the problem and may struggle with the impediment for the rest of their lives.
    On the other hand, the more that neural pathways are being stimulated and used regularly, the stronger the connections and therefore, a healthier brain. It's like a footpath that gets used every day. It's clear and safe to walk on and gets you where you need to go efficiently. If that footpath becomes neglected and unused,  it soon gets overgrown, difficult to walk on, and may disappear all together. The more pathways, the more options and diversity we have. 
    Up to around the age of 5, it is to be considered the "critical period"  where babies and children are the most responsive to learning and proper development. This is where us, as parents, can do our best to get these synapses snapping in our childrens' brains. It's as simple as talking (or singing!) to our babies as much as we can. This is crucial to their language and social development. Move with your little ones. Wave your hands around, play finger games or do a silly dance. That covers their spatial and cognitive development. Read to them. Show them what you're reading. This will encourage a healthy start to literacy. You get the picture.

    Now, these are all practices that are fairly common knowledge and for the most part, we do them instinctively as parents. The real home-run hitter is that research shows that children will learn all these things to their fullest potential when sharing these experiences with someone they love and trust....that's you. Babies need and crave personal contact and touch. From the very beginning, babies will prefer human stimuli over any other. Did you know that babies who are less than 24 hours old show active brain activity when hearing their mother's voice? Looks like our little bundles are so much more than just "empty slates". Pretty cool, eh?

Boys vs Girls

I've just read a very intriguing article on the difference in the brain development of boys vs. girls. In my recent classes, I had a group that was equally split between boys & girls and noticed an obvious distinction between what the boys were interested in and what the girls gravitated towards. I try hard not to lump children into their specific sexes and not limit my expectations to what I think their genders would dictate. You can't assume that all girls love dolls and all boys love cars. This past semester was based all around different modes of transportation & movement. It was very apparent what interested the boys. They loved the gross motor movements of pretending to be cars, airplanes, trains & pretty much anything that allowed them to moved around the room with drive & gusto. The girls, on the other hand,  loved when we had free dance with scarves, playing with chimes & bells and rhymes with finger games. It really got me thinking as to how much our influence affects their development and how much is simply hard-wired in their brains before they're even born. Here's the link to the article if you'd like to read for yourselves.Brain Development: Is the Difference between Boys & Girls all their heads?

Fascinating ways that Music affects the Development of our Brains!

Check out this link:
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