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3 Ways to Use Music to Take Children Around the World

Listen - Sing & Say - Collect - Music Around the World for Kids

Listen - Sing & Say - Collect - Music Around the World for KidsWant to take your children around the world? It’s easy with music! No passport required. No suitcases to pack. Just three simple things you can enjoy almost any time, any where, and you’re off of a grand, musical travel adventure!

Listen to music from around the world.

Every culture has its own beautiful repertoire of rich folk songs, soothing lullabies, and happy dances that can be very appealing to young children. With internet radio stations, streaming music apps, and downloadable song tracks, it’s easier than ever to listen your way around the world. Try searching on “world music for children” or “multicultural music for kids.”

Use your voice to enjoy music from around the world.

There are simple songs and chants that even young children can enjoy learning or hearing from you. In fact, our Kindermusik music library is full of these songs, rhymes, and chants from various countries and cultures. The more exposure a very young child has to other languages, both spoken and sung, the more receptive he or she will be to learning and speaking another language.

Collect instruments from around the world.

Whether someone else demonstrates the instrument or the child can explore and play it themselves, there’s nothing better than seeing, hearing, and touching the real thing. Nearly every culture has some kind of a drum, shaker, or flute-like instrument, and most are easily curated. Give your little world travelers a sense of having gone around the world simply by introducing them to some of the instruments from around the world.
Travel the world with Kindermusik
BONUS reading! How Music Helps Children Expand their Cultural Horizons
Learn more about how Kindermusik can take children around the world and give the music learning adventure of a lifetime at www.Kindermusik.com.
 

Contributed by Theresa Case who has an award-winning Kindermusik program at Piano Central Studios in beautiful upstate South Carolina.
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ABC English & Me proven classroom tips: Repetition with a twist increases learning

Kindermusik Educator Jane Denizot in France
Jane Denizot is an ABC English & Me Educator in Calvados, France. This week, she shares a few tips on how she incorporates repetition with a few activity twists in the ELL classroom for young children.

I find it is essential to have repetition and the proof is that they are learning fast. I just try to spice up things that are repeated to change it a little. I am on week two “1, 2, 3, GO!” and have followed the units as prescribed, just adding in an extra song when I thought we needed more movement.

Jane’s tips on giving repetition a twist in the ABC English & Me classroom

  • Add simple play props. At first we had no steering wheels for the Grandad’s farm activity, then later, we added coloured paper plates.
  • Repeat familiar movement and language concepts with a new song. I used the “Blue Danube” to follow on from “Clever Cows” repeating the “Up, Up” and “Down, Down” in time to the music with our scarves and they loved it.
  • Add in some silly moves for the “Hello” and “Goodbye” songs.
  • Play a new song. I also added in another activity, “The Morning Sun has Risen,” with instruments and lots of cock a doodles!

Visit the English Language Learning category or Subscribe to our blog for current news on ABC English & Me, ELL research, and Kindermusik programs around the world.

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When you run out of words

This post was shared with Minds on Music from Kindermusik educator Analiisa Reichlin. 

I sat at the dining room table with my head in my arms and just sobbed. Our studio email accounts had disappeared, our website was being migrated from a very slow, old server to a new one, and the ½ hour project turned into a week-long nightmare, and the site was down during our busiest time of the year.

Our dog Buddy had been bitten or stung by something, and had gone into anaphylactic shock. In addition, after 3 years of deals falling through at the last moment, we were just about to put an offer in on a house. But that was before the unexpected expenses that wiped our savings out.

It was only 7:30am on Tuesday. And the week really didn’t get much better. I’m sure you’ve had weeks like that, too. But before this gets too depressing…

I found myself frequently bursting into song this week. And of all the odd things – hymns from my childhood. There was something comforting about them. I began wonder why.

I remember when I took my husband-to-be, Karl, to his first musical – Showboat. I grew up on musicals, and went to as many as I could when I lived in New York City. So I was totally dumbfounded when he turned to me shortly into the first act and said, “They just burst into song. Why did they do that?”

I’m thinking, “Well, it’s a musical.”

Years later I asked [my Kindermusik partner] Miss Allison (with her degree in musical theater), why do they burst into song? And she said that the character has reached the point where the emotional intensity of the moment can no longer be conveyed with words.

So this week, when I ran out of words, I found myself singing. But why the hymns? Certainly because the words brought me comfort. But also because when I sang them, I was brought back to the time when I was young, surrounded by my family, in a moment when I felt very loved, and at peace. Where I needed to be emotionally this week.

I got to thinking…What songs did I sing to my babies, and now with my children? Because those are the songs that they are going to sing when they are grown up and need to remember the emotional security and comfort of those who loved them best.

-by Miss Analiisa, who knows that the math formulas she teaches her children may not be remembered when they are older, but the music and songs she instills in them will be in their memories forever.