Head, Shoulders, Knees, and all that

Song Street

Light blogging this week.  The beginning of April in Japan means the beginning of a new school year, so we are really busy finishing up our current term and getting ready for the new one.

In the meantime, check out a great new blog called songStreet from my colleague Troy.  Troy is a teacher at Knock Knock English and the composer, arranger, and producer of Super Simple Songs and Super Simple Songs 2 (coming soon!).  He comes at the topic of children's music and early childhood education with tremendous perspective, as both a classically trained musician and an educator with many years experience teaching young children in Canada, Japan, and Thailand. 

His blog has a lot of great ideas and resources for teachers and parents alike.  Download some of the transportation themed short musical bits he created for music and movement activities.   I also recommend listening to a re-mix he put together of a couple of our very talented students, Chikara and Junya, kind of singing their ABCs.  A lot of fun.

Anyways...tons of stuff there worth checking out.  Enjoy!

How babies learn their first words

LiveScience.com has posted an interesting article on how babies learn their first words.  Recent research has shown that babies don't really listen to what their caretakers want them to listen to, but assign new words they hear to the objects they are interested in.  For example, were a mother to say, "Look at the flower...the flower!  What a pretty flower!" , but the baby's interest is captivated by a bird, the baby is likely to learn the novel word flower (we're talking comprehension, not speech) but might associate it with the bird. 

Babies hear their caretakers, but assume that the word they hear is referring to what the baby is interested in, not necessarily what the caretaker is referring to.  It's apparently not until around 18 months that young ones begin to learn to gauge the speaker's interest when learning new words.

The leader of the study said:

"Sometimes we fail to take notice of what our learners are doing and what they're interested in," she said. "We all learn best when things are meaningful."

That's really one of the challenges of early childhood education, and, I would add, children's music.  Although we all learn best when things are meaningful, adults have the ability to hammer down and learn even when things aren't terribly meaningful to them.  However, with children, if you can't find the interest point, good luck.  And those interest points shift dramatically in periods of months, so teaching 3 year-olds is quite different than teaching 4 year-olds, and teaching 5 year-olds is yet another ballgame. 

When working with young children, I think it's always important to start off by thinking about what activities, songs, etc. will be interesting to the children you will be working with, and then think what you can "teach" using those resources rather than deciding what you want to "teach" first and then trying to come up with resources and activities to teach with.  It may sound like a minor distinction, but it makes all the difference in the world in how you approach your classes. 

Universal Preschool

Good read in the CS Monitor about initiatives in Illinois and California to fund universal preschool. (Hat tip to tkw consulting)

Dan Zanes

Here's a nice little article on Dan Zanes.  In the article, Dan makes an important point about children's music that really hit home with me:

Zanes found that other parents had the same problem and would just play their kids the Beatles out of frustration. Zanes felt this was depriving children of an important moment in the development of their musical awareness, as well as making it plainly obvious that families could use a shared musical experience.

"I think there's a tradition of children's music that's really valuable and important," said Zanes, "and I think that skipping ahead to the Beatles, and pop music with a lot of romantic love, something gets missed."

Music is a tremendous way to engage children and help learn about themselves and the world around them.  Of course you should be exposing your children to the Beatles, Mozart, ...heck, whoever you are listening to..  The more music we expose our children to, the better.  But great kids' music speaks directly to the experiences of childhood and gives children a sense of ownership over the music.  After we made Super Simple Songs, one of the greatest pieces of feedback we got was from a parent who told us her 3 year-old son called the CD his "Big Boy Music".  Now...our CD was made for toddlers, but the fact that the music on our CD speaks to his experiences at a level which he can comprehend and participate with makes him feel like a Big Boy. 

Good children's music makes music something much more than background noise or even great rhythms for kids to move to.  It makes music into a participatory experience that helps children understand the world around them better.  Dan Zanes is not a bad place to start. 

I'd say more about Dan Zanes and the great children's music he makes, but he's got to be the most well known American children's artist out there and there is plenty written about him already.  You can start at the Dan Zanes website.  Stefan at Zooglobble has reviews of all of Dan Zane's albums.

Teacher tips from Slovenia

Anita Bezic has some helpful ideas for Teaching Very Young Learners over at her blog.  She summarizes a seminar she attended in Slovenia geared towards EFL teachers, but the ideas apply to all young learners.  Her blog has a really cool feature...click on one of the flags beneath any of her posts for immediate translation into another language.  Check it out.

Happy Birthday Mister Rogers

Fred Rogers was born on this day in 1928.  I, like most American kids, grew up watching Mister Rogers on PBS (America's Public Broadcasting System).  He was (rather is, even after his passing) a national treasure.  I'm sure he profoundly affected some of the ways I approach early childhood education...the way I talk with my students now, the respect I have for their intelligence and depth of thought, the importance of creative play...  I'm sure I learned a bit about empathy from Fred, and about understanding and communicating to kids that we are all special and important.   

I felt like Mister Rogers understood that even very young children thought in sophisticated ways about some pretty deep ideas, but communicating with them about those ideas required some simplification in your communication style.   The idea is not necessarily to always simplify what you communicate about, but to simplify how you communicate about it.  He dealt with themes as complex as death, divorce, adoption, body awareness, anger (as well as many, many lighter topics)...yet always in a positive, empathetic way that reached children in a way most adults can't. 

I felt like he understood that kids want to participate, not just be entertained, but you've got to allow them to.  He spoke directly to the camera, encouraging a dialogue.  His songs are welcoming and simple enough that kids can sing along, can make the songs their own, even when they are about complex issues.  In arranging his songs simply, and in creating lyrics even toddlers could follow and sing, he was able to communicate about sophisticated and simple ideas alike.  He communicated with children, he didn't perform for them. 

The Grammy Award for Best Children's Musical Album this year went to the Mister Rogers tribute album.  I had mixed feelings about that.  I would have been thrilled if an album of Mister Rogers performing his songs had won, but this album was kind of an adult contemporary tribute to Mister Rogers, made for adults more than kids.  The simplicity of his songs (the arrangment and the lyrics, not necessarily the topics) is what makes them so great and so timeless to me, so I felt like it was kind of missing the point to line up the best singers and producers to perform his music.  I honestly felt the 4 other albums were much better children's albums, but I understand that it would have been hard for any adult to vote against Mister Rogers.

To hear some Mister Rogers classics performed by the man himself, check out PBS kids.  How's this for a wonderful, simple children's song? 

The Archive of American Television's 4 1/2 hour interview with Fred Rogers has recently been posted at Google video.  Obviously, that's an awful lot of interview to sit down and watch in one sitting, but try watching one half hour segment a week.  Or better yet, just let the interviews play as you do your work throughout the day or do some housecleaning...whatever.  He talks about everything from his childhood to his thoughts on kids to insights on the TV and recording businesses. You are sure to be a better person for having listened.

Children's songs for St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Pat's Day!  For some great ideas for easy children's St. Patrick's Day songs, check out Preschool Education dot com.  Here's just one of the many simple ideas they have posted:

St. Patrick's Day Song   Original  Author Unknown

Sung to: "If  You're Happy and You Know It"

If you're wearing green today, dance a jig,
If you're wearing green today, dance a jig,
If you're wearing green today,
Dance a jig, then smile and say,
"Have a very Happy St. Patrick's Day"

Additional verses:
"If you're wearing green today,  clap your hands"
"If you're wearing green today, spin around"
"If you're wearing green today, shout "Hurray!""
"If you're wearing green today, stamp your feet"

And is always the case when you want to learn about holidays, check out Mama Lisa for the scoop on what St. Patrick's Day is all about and to learn some real Irish kids' songs (my favorite being that poor old Michael Finegan).

Luck o' the Irish to ya!

The birth of Big Bird

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting chapter in his book "The Tipping Point" about Blue's Clues and Sesame Street and how both shows succeeded in developing "sticky" programming...material kids could remember, comprehend, and would come back for more of. It's ostensibly a marketing book, some would call it more a study of social interaction and influence, but it has some interesting insights in that particular chapter about what appeals to children. Here's an excerpt.

Sing-a-long songs...

...for children with short attention spans. (hat tip to Tanja)

The powerful impact of Early Childhood Ed. programs

330,000 children annually are born premature in the U.S.  Children born prematurely often have learning difficulties and many end up in Special Education or being held back a year, which, besides being less than ideal for the children and their families obviously, also costs the state a lot of money.    And that's not even considering the additional individual and societal costs of failing students dropping out and falling through the cracks or into the prison system.

Last week, National Public Radio had a story (Early Education Boosts Prospects of Premature Children) on a study published last week in the journal Pediatrics. The study, lead by Maureen McCormick (no, not Marcia from the Brady Bunch) of the Harvard Public School of Health, focused on the long-term effects on early childhood enrichment programs, following 1,000 prematurely born children through the age of 18, half of whom received special educational care in their earliest years (0-3).  Most of the kids who received the early education had higher reading and math scores.  The exception was the smallest premies, who lost some of the initial gains they had shown in earlier reports on this study (higher IQ scores in their first years of school). 

Dr. McCormick argues that if early childhood education programs can have such a positive effect even on children who are born at a developmental disadvantage, then they can help all children.

Putting aside moral implications, from an economic standpoint, the question is, does the investment required to provide early childhood programs to everyone, or even just to biologically disadvantaged kids like premies or economically disadvantaged children, pay off in the end?   I would argue the evidence has been stacking up that early childhood education makes a significant difference, and even if you figure from a purely dollars and cents POV that it's cheaper for the state to build more prisons to deal with the kids who fall through the cracks, you are not taking into account the benefits of innovation and productivity that a well-educated society brings. 

Aside from that, it's just the right thing to do.  It's hard to look at a study like this which clearly shows the positive impact of aggressively funding early education and then have a discussion over whether the richest country in the world can afford it.  (No, I'm not talking about Luxembourg.)

If you'd like to stay up-to-date on what you can do to encourage government support of early childhood education, visit zerotothree.org and sign up for their eNewsletter.