Music

With Valentine’s Day this week, the children in Stages 3 and 4 shared some things they loved in our introduction new song, “Hello, My Name Is”. We love our families; books; puzzles and dinosaurs, to mention a few. Standing up in front of the class can be daunting for some, so I was so happy to see that our friends Oliver and Esta had the confidence to stand up this week! Once we were through our song and introductions, we picked up our maracas for our warmup scales on ‘MA’ and ‘LA’, being sure to try to keep our tongue in our mouth to help create the correct shape for ‘LA’. With our voices warm, we sang our “Good Morning Song”; “ABCs” at an increasing tempo to help build our rhythm and layering this exercise for coordination; and “The Sunflower Song”, this week adding simple maths equations by adding one farmer each round.

We have been working on our rhythm animals for the last two weeks; from shaking and stomping to trying to keep in time with changing rhythms to music. This week I brought in building blocks to help us ‘build a rhythm’. We first started by finding how many sounds are in some of our names, and then found how many sounds/shakes were in our animals of ‘DOG’, ‘CAT’ and ‘SPIDER’. DOG and CAT were represented by a single block, while SPIDER is represented by a double block. We swapped and changed the blocks around to help us build and play different rhythms.

In Stage 2 and The Fledglings we opened the lesson with “Open Shut Them” to get our hands moving and our brains switched on. We started learning “Wake Up Body”, a movement warm-up to help us create awareness of different parts of our body, waking up our hands, shoulders, nose, hips and feet. Once our bodies were awake, we warmed up our voices with our simples scales with our counting on ‘MA’.

With our maracas we sang through our sing-a- longs, working on our coordination and movement while helping build our listening skills. “Walking Walking” helps us engage various major motor movements from jumping, stomping, tiptoeing and stopping at different tempi –all before coming to a stop. We introduced “Johnny’s Hammers”, which is a simple song to help with our coordination between our hands and feet, while learning to count up from 1. To end the lesson, we had some play on the Piano Mat. Taking it in turns, the children came up to move across the mat to make it create sound. They walked, stomped or jumped across – while all our other friends practised patiently waiting for their turn.

In The Nest we opened the lesson with our instruments and sing-a-longs. It’s so great to see our little ones becoming more confident and engaged. We used our maracas for major motor, our castanets for fine motor with our “ABCs”; “Wheels on the Bus” and “Twinkle Twinkle”. We introduced our bells, which we held and shook along to “BINGO”. The children had free range to choose and play whichever instruments they preferred.

To end the lesson we used the Piano Play Mat to encourage them to stand up and walk across, although some of our little ones managed to crawl!