Posted on

Music and the Senses

Kindermusik Classes - Learning Through Music & Our Senses

Happy New Year from Kindermusik International!

What better way to start the new year than to learn through music and our senses. Are you enrolled for classes in January?

Kindermusik Classes - Learning Through Music & Our Senses“Experiences and sensations are learning.  Sensations form the base understanding from which concepts and thinking develop.  Therefore, sensory enriched environments are imperative to learning.”
(Smart Moves by Carla Hannaford)

Multi-sensory learning is like glue for the brain.  According to Carla Hannaford’s work in Smart Moves, multi-sensory learning partnered with a positive emotional experience leads to learning, reasoning, thought.  That’s a Kindermusik class!

Kindermusik Classes use Music, Movement, and our Senses!

Each week in Kindermusik class we are using your child’s senses – eyes, ears, tongue, the skin, etc. – to build a foundation of knowledge.  It has been said that learning does not occur without movement, because the brain is not taking in information from the environment. As a result, your child is moving and learning and thinking and creating new ideas.

Sensory rich environments are also considered one of three major factors that lead to competency in adulthood.  What are the other two factors? Continue reading “Music and the Senses”

Posted on

Kindermusik and Your Child: Multisensory Equals More Memory and More Skills!

Multisensory Learning Activities with Kindermusik

Your child needs more than exposure to music. Your child needs participation in music! He/she thrives on emotionally engaging music activities which integrate sight, sound, touch, and movement. Through these joyful music experiences your child is learning to love music for all of her life, plus a whole lot more!

Multisensory Activities

Activities that incorporate learning through several senses are known as multisensory activities. In the Kindermusik classroom, every activity is a multisensory activity because we know that:

  • Children learn through their senses. Each sense activates specific neurons in the brain; therefore, multi-sensory activities generally provide more lasting learning opportunities than single-sensory activities.
  • Each child is unique and brings to class his or her own learning style which determines how he or she understands and organizes information. Read here for more information about three main learning styles and a description of how children with these learning styles may behave in the classroom:

Our best advice? Think of your child as a string. If you push it, it bunches up. If you guide it along, it moves beautifully. So joyfully accept your child as he is, and work with him to make the most of his abilities as they relate to his learning style. We think it is worth restating the following quote this week in the context of our multi-sensory focus.

"Short-term memory has the ability to hold about seven bits of information. But when patterns and related groupings of information are bound together as a unit (as in our multisensory play) the volume of material stored increases. "

– Rhythms of Learning by Chris Brewer and Don G. Campbell

Multisensory Learning

At Kindermusik, we support the wonder and uniqueness of each child, and we’re really proud of the way that the Kindermusik curricula embrace all learning styles by providing multisensory activities to appeal to as many of your child’s senses as possible. But we also recognize that it us up to the teacher and the parent to identify – and celebrate – the wonderful variety of learning styles that are in each class!

Compiled by Theresa Case, whose Kindermusik program at Piano Central Studios in Greenville, SC, is proudly among the top 1% of Kindermusik programs worldwide.