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"The trick is not how much pain you feel�"but how much joy you feel.  Any idiot can feel pain.  Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses." - Erica Jong

Teaching Music and Steady Beat

In her Exchange article (September 2003), "Value for Learning and Living: Insights on the Value of Music and Steady Beat," Phyllis Weikart describes why music and steady beat need to be taught in the early years, and provides guidance on doing so. In the article she observes...

"Standardized testing shows that children with steady beat independence are better readers and more successful in mathematics. Further, teachers report that children with better abilities in steady beat are more well behaved in class and have less aggressive physical contact with other students. Steady beat seems to help in these areas because it contributes to childrenâs ability to concentrate, to understand space and distance, and to have better control of physical movements. 

"So how do we help children become more skilled in music and steady beat? Children learn by exploring, sharing, imitating, describing, comparing, contrasting, and applying. They learn by planning their action and by reflecting on that action to take it to a conscious verbal level. As adults we often tire of the same action song. We may naturally resent it when a child requests that the group skip again, when we would rather engage in a new movement. However, we must recognize that repetition is an essential component for building basic skills. Repetition builds understanding. We need to encourage children to talk about what they are going to do ÷ for example, to describe how they plan to move from their cleanup tasks to the circle-time area. 

"Once they get where they are going, we need to encourage children to reflect on how they moved there. At first, we may have to provide children with the language for such descriptions. Over time they will be able to use their own words to describe and reflect on their actions and experiences. In addition to doing the actual movement, using descriptive language helps children build an understanding of how their bodies move and how they can control these movements."

The entire Phyllis Weikart article in available for free on our home page at http://mail.ccie.com/go/eed/0361.

For this week's Exchange Insta-Poll we are inviting you to tell us the favorite songs of preschool children in your community. To share you views, go to http://mail.ccie.com/go/eed/0362

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