Music therapy and early childhood special education

Source: American Music Therapy Association

With more than 30 years experience of using music to reach children of all abilities, we experience every day the profound impact of music, including how music can be used in early childhood special education. Last year NPR’s Talk of the Nation featured a discussion with licensed music therapists who use music to treat stress and speech disorders. In addition to highlighting personal experiences in practicing music therapy, these music therapists discussed the latest research that showed music therapy can:

• Decrease anxiety levels in cancer patients and people with heart disease
• Improve quality of life in cancer patients and patients at the end of life
• Reduce heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure
• Help people who have lost expressive language communicate through singing

Children with autism and music therapy

One of the callers, a parent with two children with autism shared her family’s experience with music therapy:

“My son, my 6-six-year-old son, basically did not speak. He would string maybe two words together. That was his idea of a sentence. I walked into a pet store one day, and he sang from beginning to end the song “Slippery Fish.” It had seven stanzas. And I—my jaw hit the floor—and I went back to his access liaison with the state, and I said he doesn’t speak, yet he sang this song. She goes he needs music therapy….

We have had eight different music therapists now…my child, my nonverbal child, the one that spoke like two words together with his sentence, he speaks, he communicates, he can give us his wants.

I mean, he’s not talkative. He’s not—but the music therapist, she comes twice a week. This has made such a huge difference to our family, to our life, his ability to be educated, to provide self-care.”

To hear the show, Talk of the Nation: “Treating Stress, Speech Disorders with Music,” in its entirety or to read the transcripts, go here.

Early childhood special education curriculum uses music to teach children

Our special education curriculum, ABC Music & Me, uses music to teach children of all abilities early literacy and language, social and emotional skills, and to strengthen fine and gross motor skills, and more. ABC Music & Me is not a therapeutic program, however, many music therapists use or recommend ABC Music & Me or Kindermusik curricula to families whose children experience physical, emotional, cognitive, or social challenges. Students with special needs who use our early childhood special education curriculum show gains in literacy and language skills.

Special needs teachers appreciate the supplemental strategies guide, Meeting Special Needs,organized unit-by-unit and lesson-by-lesson, that suggests activity adaptations for children with particular needs or impairments. Plus, our exclusive customer website includes the tools teachers need for students’ IEPs, including IEP objective descriptors for easy cut-and-paste and IEP skills booster index.

5 early literacy Christmas activities

Mother Goose could well be called the Mother of Early Literacy. “Hey Diddle, Diddle,” “Little Miss Muffet,” and other nursery rhymes support early literacy by building phonemic awareness through experiences that recognize, repeat, and predict rhymes. Rhyming word play contributes to phonemic awareness as children begin to hear the differences and similarities between words like “moon” and “spoon” and “muffet” and “tuffet.”

Along with favorites from Mother Goose, this holiday season add a penguin to your early literacy activities with Penguin’s Christmas Gift. This story download, created by Kindermusik International,combines rhymes with active listening as children hear the story of a tiny penguin who turns an ordinary tree into an extraordinary one for an extra special Christmas at the zoo.

Download Penguin’s Christmas Gift here and use it in your class next month to support early literacy growth.

4 additional early literacy activities to use with Penguin’s Christmas Gift

If you are like many early literacy educators, your Pinterest boards contain dozens (if not hundreds!) of early literacy activities to use in the classroom. We culled through some of our favorites to use along with Penguin’s Christmas Gift.

1. Letter P Penguin Craft
2. Beginning Middle & End Instead of using a candy corn image, use a Christmas tree.
3. Rhyming Tree Literacy Activity Use branches of a Christmas tree instead. Also for pre-readers, use images and words.
4. Body Rhyme Early Literacy Activity This early literacy activity isn’t really about penguins or Christmas. We just love the movement and use of rhyming words to support phonemic awareness.

Follow our early literacy and language board on Pinterest for even more ideas.

Early literacy curriculum that uses music as the vehicle for learning

ABC Music & Me, our early literacy curriculum, uses music and movement to teach young children early literacy and language. In addition to the research-based curriculum, ABC Music & Me increases parent involvement in early childhood education by providing families with materials to use together at home.

Word learning and early literacy development

In. It. Me. He. Unless you work in the early literacy and language development arena, those four little words are, well, just four little words. However, early childhood teachers recognize them—and 90 plus more—as “Kindergarten High Frequency Words” in conjunction with the common core state standards. According to the Common Core Language Arts, children in Kindergarten will learn to read these words by sight.

Early word recognition and lifelong reading skills

Even people outside the early literacy field recognize that children and adults read differently. Early readers depend on phonemic awareness to carefully sound out each word. Eventually, children learn words by sight and can read without delay. Now early literacy development research indicates that early word acquisition can lead to better reading skills as an adult. By measuring the age at which children learn words, Dr. Tessa Webb wanted to uncover why the reading patterns of children differs from that of adults.

“Children read differently from adults, but as they grow older, they develop the same reading patterns,” Dr. Webb explained in a press release. “When adults read words they learned when they were younger, they recognize them faster and more accurately than those learned later in life.”

In Dr. Webb’s early literacy research, 300 children read aloud both familiar and unfamiliar words. Fifty percent of the words followed spelling to sound rules, whereas the other half did not. Dr. Webb’s research showed that children in the early school years read words differently from adults, but by age 10, children’s reading patterns mirrored that of an adult. Dr. Webb sees this research as an important first step in connecting word learning age to both early literacy success and later reading abilities as adults.

Music, early literacy development, and the Common Core

ABC Music & Me uses music to help children build early literacy and language skills, including vocabulary acquisition. The stories, songs, and music and movement activities introduce students to hundreds of words and their meanings. In this common core curriculum, the picture vocabulary cards support unit-by-unit vocabulary, comprehension, and memory.

Digital Materials!!

Extend the magic and learning of a Kindermusik class into your own home. Kindermusik@Home delivers your favorite Kindermusik songs and activities, music, books, and lyrics—as well as recipes, learning games for kids, crafts, and more in a green-friendly digital format.

See for yourself…

Kids (and parents) can interact with videos, printable activity pages, stories, music, games and more! The digital home materials are built specifically to make it fun and easy for parents to connect class-time to home-time, and to enrich both experiences. Access from your iPad, tablet, laptop, computer, or smartphone – and enjoy at home, or on-the-go.

Learn how Kindermusik@Home digital products are the Green Future for Kindermusik and support our mission to be a sustainable company.

Sneak-Peek of Kindermusik@Home

Want to see what it’s all about? Check out one of our new online learning games for kids. This sneak-preview is a memory game you can play with your children – and share with others!

Educational Activities for Kids include:

• Music downloads: songs, rhymes, stories and sounds from class
• Literature book in e-book format, flip through pages, turn audio on or off
• Activity buttons lead to a variety of different activity types
  • dance and movement instructions
  • fingerplay demonstrations and instructions
  • together-in-the-kitchen activities
  • music time
  • listening games
  • vocal play activities
  • video field trips
  • find-it/count-it style activities
  • ideas for pretend play
  • and more!
• The Why It’s Good for Your Child area provides parents info on why these educational activities for kids are useful, important, or developmentally significant.
• Download Center provides Printable Activity Pages and, for the first time, Printable Lyrics Pages for all of the songs in the unit.

Ask your local Kindermusik educator if these digital options are 

Spatial Awareness

The four parts of spatial awareness are: 

• Distance
• Form (shape)
• Direction
• Position (in relationship to others)

How many of you absolutely LOVE GEOMETRY?  If you want your child to love it and be good at it, then you will love learning how for the first seven years of your child’s life, Kindermusik and you will be teaching spatial orientation skills through play.  Among other benefits, spatial awareness is the basis for success in Geometry and Higher Math.

Spatial awareness is the knowledge of where you are in relationship to other people and objects in your environment.  To develop spatial awareness, children learn concepts such as direction, distance and location.

In the Kindermusik classroom, a child with spatial awareness will understand that as she walks, hops, skips or jumps toward another person in the classroom, she is coming closer to that person.  She will be able to judge how much space she and her hoop require to navigate around the room without bumping into others.  Or she will be able to tap a woodblock or drum with a mallet.

Studies have suggested a link between a well-developed sense of spatial awareness and artistic creativity, success in math, and the development of abstract thought.  The ability to organize and classify abstract mental concepts is related to the ability to organize and classify objects in space.

The key to promoting spatial awareness in your child is to encourage and allow them to explore their surroundings.  And there’s no better way to inspire that spirit of exploration and learning than in the Kindermusik classroom!

Timbre and Phonemes

In response to a popular holiday song, “Do you hear what I hear?” the answer just might be: maybe. Hearing distinct differences in sounds takes practice. For example, back in August and September, early childhood teachers welcomed new students into the classroom. On that first day of school, the classroom full of children sounded like, well, a classroom full of children. By November, however, teachers learned to identify the distinct voices of each student. In music, we call distinct sounds timbre and it helps us distinguish the sound of a violin from a guitar; Jack’s voice from Aidan’s voice; and even aids in phonemic awareness by helping us hear the difference between the sound of a letter “v” and the sound of the letter “b.”

How people perceive timbre

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University recently created a computer model that mirrored how people make judgment calls regarding timbre. In the study, participants listened to two sounds played by different musical instruments and rated how similar the sounds appeared. The computer model recognized similar subtle differences in sounds that human participants did. For example, both acknowledged that the violin and cello appeared to be closer in sound to each other than a violin and flute and wind and percussive instruments were the most different.

“There is much to be learned from how the human brain processes complex information such as musical timbre and translating this knowledge into improved computer systems and hearing technologies,” researcher Moanya Elhilali said in the article, “Music in our ears: The Science of Timbre.”

Connection between timbre, phonemes, and early literacy

In ABC Music & Me, our early literacy and language curriculum, children explore the concepts of timbre whenever they compare the differences between and among sounds. Each week in class, children may participate in active listening, singing, vocal play, and instrument exploration activities to teach them auditory discrimination. That same sound discrimination helps children hear the minute differences between letter sounds or phonemes, which supports early literacy and language development. Plus, researchers agree that music improves phonemic awareness in young children.

E-books

Thirty years ago an early literacy revolution began, but it didn’t start how you might think. It began with a single computer, well, millions of them to be exact. In 1982, the Commodore 64 personal computer became available to the general public making it affordable for parents, teachers, and schools to integrate technology into learning, including early language and literacy development. Now, preschool and elementary classrooms often include multiple computer workstations logged into early literacy websites, such as StarFall, that teach phonemic awareness, and iPads or Kindles loaded with favorite e-books.

Best practices for using e-books to boost early literacy and language development

Source: Akron Beacon Journal Online

Early childhood researchers continue to learn how to best use the latest technology to impact the early literacy and language abilities of children. A recent study from the University of Akron wanted to see how e-books affected the early literacy skills of at-risk students. For three years, the researchers followed 16 Head Start classrooms in Ohio. Half of the classrooms used traditional books and methods for learning early literacy and language, whereas the other half used e-books. The researchers found that e-books can indeed increase a child’s early literacy and language abilities.

Go Ahead and Laugh!

Laugh… for your health!  Laughter helps strengthen the immune system, lower blood pressure, and reduce stress levels.  In addition, humor helps young children handle problems or crisis situations, enhances social skills, and helps them create social bonds and healthy emotional attachments – so laugh away!

Tips for parents:  Take a few minutes for some funny faces, silly songs, knock-knock jokes, or just acting silly.  Laughing together not only has significant health benefits, it can also diffuse a tense situation and create some special bonds.  Who knew a little giggle could go such a long way?!

Bedtime Rituals

“Bedtime is a monumental moment to a baby or toddler, a time of transition in which parents hold nearly shamanistic power to tame the forces of darkness.“– Meg Cox, The Heart of A Family, p. 213.

In a Kindermusik class, we have some very special rituals we include in every class.  That’s because young children thrive on the love and comfort of favorite rituals.  At home, bedtime provides a special time of connection for parent and child. As children grow, it can also become a very special time for parents to stay connected and in touch with what is really going on in their children’s lives.

Bedtime Ritual Ideas You Can Share with Your Children

• Reading
• Listening to crickets
• Inventing stories
• Singing
• Going through a specific bedtime routine (get a drink, change diapers/get a drink, kiss & hug, turn out the light)
• Infant massage, back scratches, and foot rubs

A little goes a long way!

We know music has many benefits, especially for the way kids learn and how a child’s brain develops. So we get excited about supportive research like this study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience:

Even A Few Years Of Music Training Benefits The Brain.

A team of researchers at Northwestern University, including the well-known Nina Kraus, share findings on the benefits of early childhood music education.

“…Childhood music instructionhas strong linguistic benefits and improves performance on everyday listening tasks. Since we live in an inherently noisy world, the better we are at focusing on sound and perceiving different sounds, the better. This can be particularly important for children with learning disorders or those for whom English is a second language.”

Through this study and other research, here are some known benefits of music training:

Improves hearing

Bolsters brain function

Strengthens reading skills

Increases math abilities

Improves social development

Helps people become better team players

Supports self-esteem

Our mission at Kindermusik, to instill a lifelong love of music and a foundation for learning in children, completely aligns with this research. We are especially thrilled about the quote from Nina Kraus, supporting the concept that even little exposure to music as can go a long way

Recognizing Pitch Helps Language Skills

At Kindermusik, we know music has positive effects on early childhood development and language acquisition.  And when there’s new research to prove it, we get more excited!

Language Development in Children

Photo Credit: dailymail.co.uk

New research, reported this week in Science Daily suggests that babies who are able to recognize pitch could also detect language rules, even better than adults. Scientists found that “when it comes to extracting complex rules from spoken language, a three-month-old outperforms adult learners”.

By monitoring babies’ brain responses, scientists were able to determine that infants detected discrepancies with language rules just by hearing changes in syllables or pitch.

“These findings not only help understand how children manage to learn language so quickly during early development, but also point to a strong link between very basic auditory skills and sophisticated rule learning abilities.”

So, next time you’re at Kindermusik class with your little one, think about all the different changes in pitch and tone your child is exposed to – this is actively supporting your child’s language development skills.

The Joy of Music

Music is unique to humans, and as basic as language to human development and existence.  It is through music that a child gains insight into herself, into others, and into life itself.  Perhaps most importantly, music is part of what enables a child to better develop and sustain her creativity and imagination.  Because a day does not pass without hearing or participating in some kind of music, it is to a child’s advantage to understand music as thoroughly as she can.  As a result, she will learn to appreciate, listen to, and partake in music all the rest of her life (adapted from Gordon, 1990).

Ideas for parents:

It can be very simple to surround your child with music – the greater the variety, the better! 

• Singing simple songs together can get the morning off to a great start.
• Child-safe instruments and some recorded music can provide happy times of self-entertainment or together time.
• Quiet, soothing music before naps and bedtime establishes a wonderfully reassuring sleep time routine.
• A dance around the kitchen can soothe the supper-time “fussies.”
• A cuddle and a lullaby at the end of the day adds the sweetest and happiest of memorable moments.

A little Brain Power!!

We know music has many benefits, especially for the way kids learn and how a child’s brain develops. So we get excited about supportive research like this study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience:

Even A Few Years Of Music Training Benefits The Brain.

A team of researchers at Northwestern University, including the well-known Nina Kraus, share findings on the benefits of early childhood music education.

“…Childhood music instructionhas strong linguistic benefits and improves performance on everyday listening tasks. Since we live in an inherently noisy world, the better we are at focusing on sound and perceiving different sounds, the better. This can be particularly important for children with learning disorders or those for whom English is a second language.”

Through this study and other research, here are some known benefits of music training:

Improves hearing

Bolsters brain function

Strengthens reading skills

Increases math abilities

Improves social development

Helps people become better team players

Supports self-esteem

Our mission at Kindermusik, to instill a lifelong love of music and a foundation for learning in children, completely aligns with this research. We are especially thrilled about the quote from Nina Kraus, supporting the concept that even little exposure to music as can go a long way…

“Based on what we already know about the ways that music helps shape the brain, the study suggests that short-term music lessons may enhance lifelong listening and learning,” said Kraus.

Pattern Awareness

Pattern awareness is crucial to learning and memory. Just as in reading stories, singing and rhythmic speech expose participants directly to the patterns of language, including rhythm, speech sounds, syntax, and rhyme.

Tips for parents:

Patterns are all around – outdoors, indoors, in colors, how we arrange items on the counter or table, and even on the clothes we wear. With patterns surrounding us, it’s easy to play “pick up” pattern games with your child. First, point to the pattern. Have your child identify the individual parts. Then work together to point out how it all goes together. If there are objects that can be moved, you can even challenge your child to create some patterns of his own.

Social-Emotional Development

• Making friends.
• Sharing.
• Learning how to express frustration appropriately.
• Figuring out conflicts peacefully.
• Helping someone who has been hurt.
• Waiting patiently.
• Following rules.
• Enjoying the company of others.
• Internal motivation to succeed

All of these qualities (and more!) describe what we all wish to see as parents is the healthy social development of our children. Like any skill, young children develop these abilities in small steps over time, and they learn them from you, their first social connection and teacher. On the whole, young children who spend time singing, playing, and moving with other children are better prepared to be confident and self-aware, build positive relationships with peers, and get the best out of the learning environments and opportunities that life will bring them…just one of the many reasons that Kindermusik is so much more than music!

The Kindermusik classroom is the perfect place for your child to practice and develop social skills. Our activities help children learn to work with, understand, and enjoy others, while teaching parents to model activities that include social interaction and the joy of learning. At every level from Birth – 7, Kindermusik curricula are written to support the development of your child’s social & emotional skills with age-appropriate, challenging activities.

In fact, studies show that music and movement experiences in a group setting impact all seven areas of social-emotional development* identified by researchers.  Those seven areas are:

• Confidence
• Curiosity
• Intentionality
• Self-control
• Relatedness
• Capacity to communicate
• Cooperativeness