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Music and Movement at the Library

November 22, 2014

Early Childhood Programs and Services committee

This past summer, the Fayetteville Free Library (FFL) offered several new early literacy programs targeted at improving family health and nutrition. Perhaps the most popular of these were our “Music and Movement” programs for infants through preschoolers. We know that music and movement are important at every stage of a child’s development, and can be made applicable for children who are at different stages. We were especially interested in creating new ways to engage families with babies and toddlers, and this series provided a fun, dynamic way to do that. In fact, libraries are well positioned to provide access to music and movement opportunities for children. As children’s librarians we already sing, clap, and engage in dramatic play through action rhymes in our storytimes. And while there might be other businesses that offer these types of programs, we found that they are often expensive and cost prohibitive to some families. I don’t claim to be a music educator, but I do think that, as librarians, we can instill in children a love of music in much the same way that we encourage a love of reading.

So why is it important to offer a music and movement program? Research shows that “movement education is basic physical education that emphasizes fundamental motor skills and concepts such as body and spatial awareness, but that it is also a philosophy of physical education in that it is success-oriented, child-centered, and non-competitive”  (Pica, emphasis mine). We also know that childhood obesity rates in American are at an all time high. Music and movement programs not only aid a child’s physical development, they help children “feel good about their movement abilities, [thus] they are more likely to make physical activity part of their lives” (Pica). An active lifestyle is essential for a child’s overall physical fitness and health.

Benefits to Movement

There are many obvious physical benefits to movement, including cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition.

Children need 60 minutes of play with moderate to vigorous activity every day to grow up to a healthy weight (letsmove.gov).

Movement also has social and emotional benefits, as it helps children unleash creativity through physical expression like dance. Certain games and activities can also teach them cooperation and help them work together with peers and adults.

Finally, movement also helps children develop cognitively; “studies have proven that they especially acquire knowledge experientially–through play, experimentation, exploration, and discovery.  Though a developmentally appropriate movement program, instructors can help nurture the bodily/kinesthetic intelligence possessed in varying degrees, by all children” (Pica).

Benefits of Music

Music is vital to the development of language and listening skills. We know from Every Child Read to Read that singing is an important early literacy practice, and is a key way children learn about language.

Music’s melody and rhythmic patterns help develop memory, which is why it’s easier to remember song lyrics than prose text. This is why we learn our ABC’s in a song.

Music engages the brain, stimulating neural pathways that are associated with higher forms of intelligence such as empathy and mathematics. (National Association for Music Education)

Music and language arts both consist of symbols and ideas; when the two are used in combination, abstract concepts become more concrete and are therefore easier for children to grasp. (National Association for Music Education)

Program Plan

Hopefully, now you’re convinced and wondering how to implement a Music and Movement program of your own. Chances are you already have most of the ingredients! I used a combination of acapella singing and children’s CDs for the music. I then broke the 30-45 minute program down into different activities and skills, for example, exploring up and down/ stretching and jumping; clapping and rhythm; clapping/singing and tempo; etc. Many of the songs and rhymes I used to correspond to these activities are familiar and beloved: “Pop Goes the Weasel” for jumping, “If You’re Happy and You Know It” for clapping, “Row Your Boat” for rhythm. For each song we sang as a group, I also played a song from the CDs. Other favorites included stop and go, or statue games. Children dance and move until the music stops and then have to freeze in place! Playing “statue” develops listening skills and helps children distinguish between sound and silence. It also helps them practice self control, starting, and stopping. “Stop and Go” by Greg & Steve and “Bodies 1-2-3” by Peter & Ellen Allard are perfect songs for this activity, but you can really use any song and then manually stop the music unexpectedly!  

In the second half of the program, we explore an instrument. Shakers and bells are perfect for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, and rhythm sticks are fun for older groups. There are tons of great shaking songs, including “Shake Your Sillies Out” by Raffi, “Shake, Rattle & Rock” by Greg & Steve, “Shaky, Shaky” by the Wiggles. “Frere Jacques” is a classic if you’re using bells. If you can’t afford a large set of instruments, you can also make your own and explore the sounds of common household items. I sometimes intersperse this half of the program with movement activities like jumping jacks and toe touches. Finally, we end with the parachute activities. We bought a 12’ parachute for $25-30 and a smaller 6’ one for use with the babies and toddlers. Not only are the parachutes endlessly entertain to children of all ages, they have a myriad of uses and promote teamwork and coordination. If you have bean bags, small balls, or a beach ball to add, even better.

Our Music and Movement Program at the Fayetteville Free Library was wildly successful with 40-50 attendees at each session. It was the perfect way for us to reach families with young children of all ages and support family health and an active lifestyle at the same time. Do you offer a music and movement program at your library? Tell us about it in the comments!

Resources for Music and Movement Education

Pica, R., & Pica, R. (2010). Experiences in movement & music: Birth to age 8. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.

Early Childhood Music and Movement Association

LetsMove.gov

National Association for Music Education

(Photos courtesy guest blogger)

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Stephanie Prato is a member of the ALSC Early Childhood Programs and Services Committee. She is the Director of Play to Learn Services at the Fayetteville Free Library in NY. If you have any questions, email her at sprato@fflib.org.

[nebulae12]

Hi. I really love and adore your drawings and when I found your photo blog I got very happy. However when I checked it and saw all these dead animals... I couldn't believe in that. I thought you were an animal lover. It is good to give them to the earth maybe, but why do you take photos of them? Why do you share these photos? It was so hard even to see these poor dead animal bodies, but sharing them as if their death has an aesthetic delight.... Sorry, but I disappointed about you...

I’m sorry that seeing my photos of dead animals was difficult for you. Yes, I am absolutely an animal lover, I’m about as passionate of an animal lover as it’s possible to be! Most of what I think or talk about on a daily basis is animals; I am deeply committed to protecting and respecting nature in everything I do, from political and environmental concerns to my own personal ethical decisions of living a vegan lifestyle and getting around by bicycle instead of car; I literally burst into tears of delight if I watch a rabbit do normal rabbit things for more than a minute. I’ve dedicated my life to drawing animals whenever possible – and large percentage of those animals I draw are dead ones, even if it’s not immediately obvious at first glance. My love for nature extends to all parts of it, not just what is conventionally viewed as pretty, and nature operates according to cycles of life and death. It pairs (as we perceive it, anyway) moments of tenderness and harmony and symbiosis with moments of chaos and tragedy and brutality. The things that we consider to be beautiful in nature aren’t possible without the things that we associate with ugliness, and I choose not to shy away from either extreme. 

To your question, I absolutely am capable of finding as much aesthetic beauty in a dead thing or a tragedy or something that makes me sad, as I am in something that is beautiful and fills me with joy, and I don’t see anything negative about documenting and sharing that. Anyone who actually engages with nature and wilderness on a regular basis learns that death and suffering are everywhere, and stumbling across it in your explorations is inevitable. So I come across animal remains all the time, and every time I have to decide on the appropriate action in that case. Most often I experience a few moments of reverence and curiosity and regret for the ended life and move on, and don’t document the experience or engage with the remains in any way. Sometimes I am moved by the experience enough to take a photo to remember it, and sometimes, if that photo turns out to be beautiful to me, I might post it, because I know there are a lot of other people out there who identify with what I’m feeling. There are times that I post the photo because I’m angry, because the animal’s death was the result of cars or trains or a collision with a building, and I’m overwhelmed by the helpless injustice of so many of the deaths that humans bring upon animals, and I want to force others to confront the consequences of how we all live, with full knowledge that no matter how much I try to live a responsible life, I’m still complicit in these deaths. There are times, when an animal dies an unnatural death out in the open and its body is on display for passersby to see and feel callously grossed out by, that I literally scrape some poor creature off the cement, dig a hole, bury it, put flowers on its grave, and cry for its death; nothing but the deepest levels of sorrow and sympathy could move me to do this. 

There are people who will roll their eyes at all of this and that’s fine, but for me, finding a dead thing is the most impactful experience that I’ve ever had in life. No matter how often it happens, it feels the same – dizzying and surreal and haunting and fascinating and deeply heartbreaking. But there’s how we feel, and then there’s what we do with those feelings. Curiosity is the reaction that moves me to usually try to figure out why it died (which is a lot of the time a complete mystery) and to examine it closely if I can handle doing so, because there are not many times in life that you have the opportunity to look at a wild animal from an inch away or literally feel its weight in your hand or the softness of its feathers or fur, and that information is super valuable to me as an artist. A funeral is a different type of reaction, a personal and emotional one, which for me transforms the guilt and heaviness of having to walk away from this little tragedy into a futile but meaningful expression of respect and acknowledgement and reverence and apology. And the third type of reaction I have is to make art that tries to make sense of all of this, by fixating on a single fallen animal as a representation of every other animal I’ve found, and by making its death appear beautiful, because it is – its death nourishes the soil as it decomposes and new life springs from that. I’ve never been able to accurately express all these complexities in one piece of art, but attempting to is what drives me to draw and paint at all. So literally, my art doesn’t exist without me coming across these dead animals and being moved by them, so why would I censor that part of the creative process? If anything, you even asking me these questions proves to me that my message and goals don’t necessarily shine through in my art in the way I want them to, and so I have lots of work left to do :) 

[nebulae12]

Version by Robert Frost

Once there was an Archer, And there was a minute When He shot a shaft On a New Departure. Then He must have laughed: Comedy was in it. For the game He hunted Was the non-existence Of the Phoenix pullet (The Mηόύ [not being] of Plato), And the shaft got blunted On her non-resistance, Like a dum-dum bullet Did in fact get splattered Like a ripe tomato. That’s how matter mattered.

[nebulae12]

[nebulae12]

Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.

Sara Ahmed (via qfeminism)

[nebulae12]

One of the best pieces of news for musicians I’ve heard in years.

[nebulae12]

I had an interview today and I totally rocked this question:

Interviewer: How would you explain DNA to an 8 year old?

Me: I would tell them that DNA is like Legos. Like four different colored legos. Individually, they can't do much, but when you build them in a certain order, you can make different things, like a house or a tree or little lego people. It's the same in your body. Four different DNA molecules fit together to create the unique you.

Interviewer: *brief pause* That's a really good answer.

Me: Thank you. I like Legos and science.

[nebulae12]

Teddy Abrams’s Kentucky Royal Fanfare (2015) for Brass Ensemble

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Disney’s 2012 Paperman, which accompanied the theatrical release of Wreck-it Ralph.

Paperman

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“The rigorous, mathematical side of origami suits my scientific spirit.” After earning a PhD in physics and launching a career in academia, this artist found her calling crafting detailed, display-worthy origami creatures. Meet Floriane

[nebulae12]

I taped this to the door of my friend the humanities student, with the following pencilled in on top:

“All the math you will (n)ever need to know”

He later told me that he kept it there to ward off demons. This synopsis of Chapter 1 from Bundrick and Leeson’s Essentials of Abstract Algebra is the first document I ever TeXed to pdf.

[nebulae12]

Some of the most creative leaps ever taken by the human mind are decidedly irrational, even primal. Emotive forces are what drive the greatest artistic and inventive expressions of our species. How else could the sentence ‘He’s either a madman or a genius’ be understood? It’s okay to be entirely rational, provided everybody else is too. But apparently this state of existence has been achieved only in fiction [where] societal decisions get made with efficiency and dispatch, devoid of pomp, passion, and pretense. To govern a society shared by people of emotion, people of reason, and everybody in between — as well as people who think their actions are shaped by logic but in fact are shaped by feelings and nonempirical philosophies — you need politics. At its best, politics navigates all the minds-states for the sake of the greater good, alert to the rocky shoals of community, identity, and the economy. At its worst, politics thrives on the incomplete disclosure or misrepresentation of data required by an electorate to make informed decisions, whether arrived at logically or emotionally.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (via voguedissent)

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Forum discussion

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... Gretta Vosper, a pastor in the United Church of Canada, writes that “personal experience can be extremely rich and diverse, allowing for intricate investigations of what is not concrete but still understood to be equally real: thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Theology provides the perfect language with which to explore such nebulous things.”

[nebulae12]

The time is nigh!

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I've got pretty little background on these matters so some questions:

Undergraduate students or graduate students? Would the graduates of a training program in X mainly be looking for career prospects in other university departments?

Where does the momentum to start a program/department in X come from? Or does it get going with just, this is fun and interesting? Is someone else interested in the results?

This is from the standpoint of a senior undergraduate in math/stat. Mine will be a liberal arts degree (BA) and I see it not as job training, and much less as training for a job in academia. I also see at my university's statistics department there is a push to build an actuarial science program - as an X, it's not the first of its kind but in our area still uncommon - but the push is from a would-be corporate sponsor, though there is certainly interest to study it on the students' side.

In case my questions seem to point at the answer, Why not go into industry, I emphasize that I really don't know much about how academia works. I'm working with a limited language so it will tend to allude to the most obvious concepts as dictated by popular media. I also think there should be plenty of people who and opportunities to learn for the sake of learning outside the university. My more fundamental questions are, What makes a topic X really interesting to study? What makes being trained in it worthwhile? How is the 6-step scheme above not counter to the mission of the liberal arts/getting an education?

I would have posted a comment on the original post but maybe reblogging will open the floor--

The Problem with Universities: some questions

I have had the following conversation a number of times recently:

I want to do X. X is a lot of fun and is really interesting. Doing X involves a little of A and a little of B.

We should get some students to do X also.

Okay, but from where should we get the students? Students in Department of A don’t know B. Students from Department of B don’t know A.

Fine, maybe we could start a program that specifically trains people in X. In this program we’ll teach them A and B. It’ll be the first program of its kind! Woohoo!

Sure that’s great, but because there aren’t any other departments of X, the graduates of our program now have to get jobs in departments of A or B. Those departments complain that students from Department of X only know a little of A (or B).

Grrr. Go away.

Has anyone figured out a solution to this problem? Specifically, how do you train students to do something for which there’s no formal department/program without jeopardizing their career prospects?