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