Studio3Music Blog

Posts Tagged ‘babies’

Sep
15

A Helping of Music Outside the Home

While music can greatly enhance a plain ‘ol day at home, plenty of community music events happen away from the home worth venturing out for. They are often affordable, if not free!

Here are a few ideas to stimulate our thinking about finding music events outside-the-home in our communities.

Kindermusik classes are outstanding once-a-week classes that provide your child with a musical experience with “home-work” (really, “home-play”) and resources (CD’s, musical instruments, books and activity guides) to keep music a focus of your child’s life all week long.

Libraries usually provides a few concerts for kids throughout the year. In addition, the library has the information about what other concerts and music events are happening in the area. Asking questions will get us plugged into the resources for our music quest.

Public schools perform throughout the year. The high school concerts can be good enough quality and the musical selections are most often classics. Another benefit is that kids get to see kids performing, giving them a vision for their own musical involvement.

Community colleges also have concerts open to the public that are free or low cost, usually with an increase in quality as the students are older.

Churches have been a harbinger of great music for centuries. Today many churches are still active music venues. Not only do they often have their own semi-professional choirs or bands, but they often invite other performers in for special concerts. Around the holidays, churches are the best place to find free musical events to attend or to be involved in. Special Christmas choirs welcome children. Some churches offer free or low cost musical lessons. The internet can help us search for these opportunities locally.

Local symphonies commonly offer student ticket rates or special children’s events. These folks know that their survival depends on the next generation falling in love with classical music. As a community organization, their goal is to get their music out to the public, not be exclusive. So ask for a discount or scholarship if needed!

Bookstores like Third Place Books and Barnes and Nobles offer free musical events all year long. During long winter days, these concerts can save the day. Their schedules are often posted or printed for busy parents to take along, or available on the internet.

Summer concert series are just about done for the season. In most communities, we can find a free outdoor concert at least one day of the week, if not more. My friend’s community combined their concerts with the farmers markets. Any place people gather in the summer, people are likely to include music.

With a little planning, our kids can have a rich musical experience. Such a variety is available whether we’re investing big money, or living on a shoestring in a down economy. Our children’s lives can be enriched as we dish up a good serving of music daily, whether at home or outside.

-posted by Donna Detweiler, who is encouraged that a child’s musical diet doesn’t need to be skimpy even in lean economic times!

Tags: babies, concert, Donna Detweiler, kindermusik, music, preschoolers, Things to do, toddlers

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Sep
7

In Celebration of Messy

Posted in Bits and Pieces, Family, parenting

Messy is underrated. I recently heard of a movement of mothers who are trying to make messy the new “in.” I like that idea. It goes along better with the Law of Entropy: My house moves naturally toward messy without any help from me. When neat is the goal, I have to put some scrub to the tub, so to speak.

When I heard about this messy movement, it captured my attention. Are my standards too high I wondered? Am I bowing to the gods of neatness when my time could be better spent elsewhere? Mind you, we’re not talking about dishes left in the sink for days, or filthy bathrooms. We’re talking about how picked up and beautiful we feel our house should look all the time. You know that fleeting ideal– how the house looks when there are no people in it. When the cleaning lady (me) has finished and no one is home yet, or before the guests arrive for our child’s birthday party with its festive table setting.

When I heard of the messy movement, I immediately thought of a few friends who I’ve always admired for their toleration of mess—no kidding! There’s Caroline (name changed just in case she doesn’t yet see being messy as an admirable trait.) When you enter her house, you notice that her main living room has a large pop-up princess fort and one of those crawling tunnels. The Little Tykes kitchen is in the corner with the cookware and fake food strewn around. Living in a chilly, rainy climate, these toys provide an indoor large motor play place for her children. Because the living room has the most space, they use it for what their family needs most in this phase of life. On the occasions that grown-ups are over, the stuff gets moved, but on a daily basis, the living room is play central. That practical attitude gets a messy award!

Another friend of mine has a messy art table by their front door (which I blogged about earlier this year). No hiding away this messy space in shame. Art projects are not interrupted prematurely by a need to clean. Once in a while pens and paint jars are capped, but not before some have dried to a crust. Piles of paper grace the floor and scissors, crayons and glue cover the table top. A true messy haven for a budding artist, who paints and draws for hours each day I’m told.

The point of the messy movement, I would guess, is not mess for its own sake. It’s a reaction to a perfectionistic mentality. When we have an unhealthy ideal of what our home should look like, we can be so driven to achieve this unrealistic goal that we drive ourselves and our families crazy. We aren’t having any fun and neither is anybody else as we chase this illusion of a perfect home.

Parents, I have a proclamation for us: Family life is messy. Seems to me the messy movement is all about bringing balance to our lives. There’s a time to clean and a time to be messy. When our children are young, it is the time to be messy. Celebrating messy is part of celebrating kids. So let’s spend a bit less time restacking the Tupperware they’ve thrown into the cupboard (or whatever our neatness obsession is), and more time taking our kids out to the garden to play. Afterwards we can cut some beautiful flowers to put in a vase for the kitchen table. We can clear a space for it in the middle.

-posted by Donna Detweiler who hears there’s plenty of time to have a clean house (and be lonely and wish it were messy again) after the kids are gone.

Tags: babies, Donna Detweiler, parenting, preschoolers, toddlers

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Sep
4

More Music, Please!

Posted in Family, Things to do

At Kindermusik, we believe music is as good for kids as Gummi-Vites and as yummy as birthday cake and ice cream! Ever heard you kids complain about having to listen to music? Maybe opera isn’t their favorite, but most kids consume music like fishy crackers. More, please!

So the goal today is to get us thinking about how to up our kids’ consumption of good music on a daily basis. Note: I’m not talking about adding Musak to life but asking how can we thoughtfully include music in our children’s lives which will enrich their lives and, as research shows, their brain development.

Here are a few ideas to get us thinking about how to tune in to more music throughout a typical day.

Morning: How about teaching our kids to start their day with music? If our children don’t already have their own music machine, it’s never too early. Little hands love to make music happen all by themselves. For toddlers, a cassette player or a low end CD player is perfect. Fisher Price makes a classic cassette player that can even survive a bouncing solo trip down a flight of stairs. We know. At a favorite thrift store we can find old music machines that are perfect for children to use without parental oversight. When they break, we’re usually out less that $10!

V-Tech and Fisher Price make varieties of button pushing, music making balls, caterpillars, keyboards etc. It’s wise to look for musical toys that have tunes that we like too: Some have classical fare. Others a variety of classic folk tunes. Most of us avoid the toys with repetitive ditties that stick annoyingly in our heads for days to come.

For morning listening, an accessible basket or book shelf can contain a selection of music they can pop in first thing. We have picked these out together at the library, music store or from the family collection. Depending on our families’ taste and tolerance for morning noise, we can choose Kindermusik CDs, wake up music like John Phillips Souza marches, mellow or peppy praise songs, or story songs. The choices are endless. The point is to make the choices versus letting the radio DJ’s choose; though that’s not bad if we have a station that chooses the songs we love.

Older kids may have an IPod which can be loaded with selections, however because listening with ear buds cuts our child off from the family community, I wouldn’t encourage the habit of using them unless travelling or in a situation where individualized entertainment is happening. An IPod docking station with good speakers works great for sharing music as a family.

Mid-morning Snack/Music breaks: Consider adding a music selection to snack time as a part of the routine for preschoolers. They love to listen together or with a parent, and will likely clap or sing along. Having musical instruments of their own available increases the fun.

Lunch time: We are more likely to sit with our preschoolers at lunch time, so it can be an opportunity to share music that we love. We can chat about the kind of songs, the instruments, musical patterns, or simply tell the story of why we love them. Choosing new music from the library can make a fun, listening memory with our kids. Do we like the new CD or not? Why? Can we hear the tuba, or the piccolo? Can we hear a repeated line of music? Does it make us want to march, dance, cry or take a rest?

Afternoon rest time: Surprisingly, I vividly recall my own preschool nap time with affection. My teacher would play Disney recordings as we lay quietly on our mats. Cinderella was my favorite. Today there are so many delightful story/song recordings available. Now that I have school age children, listening to radio drama has often been a highlight of our homeschool day.

Dinner time: When my son was newborn, my husband would come home from work, put on a CD and recline in the chair with our son on his chest. They enjoyed hours of music together in this manner. By the time our boy was a toddler, he would flap and wave his arms gleefully when one of their favorite CDs was played. Those two share a close relationship. I suspect the shared music helped create their bond. Listening to music as a family at dinner time can create lifelong memories for kids. The winding down time right before or after dinner is also a good time listening to story or music recordings.

Bedtime: Bedtime routine lends itself naturally to music. Many kids like to fall asleep to a beloved lullaby CD. The calming effect of music is legendary. From Brahms lullabies to Jim Brickman piano solos, the options are endless. The challenge is to try some new ones now and then. Kids can fall in love with more than one bedtime CD.

Kids can never get enough of the sweet stuff of life, which includes music. So, how about giving them some more…please.

-posted by Donna Detweiler, whose musical taste is quite varied, but she has a sweet spot of bluegrass.

Tags: babies, brain, Donna Detweiler, music, parenting, preschoolers, Things to do, toddlers

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Jul
21

The Arts Develop Smarts!

Posted in Child Development, Education, Music and the brain

Over the next several days, take some time to observe your children (or someone else’s) at play. Notice how many times singing, dancing, coloring, creating, music making, drawing, sculpting (think play dough) occurs. All of these activities are natural forms of art.

I love how Wikipedia defines art: “Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions and intellect.”

That definition totally fits with what we know about brain development from birth to 7. During this period, the brain’s entire job is to organize information (deliberately arrange items) it receives from all the senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, vestibular, proprioceptive), and then learn what to do with that info.

Every time a child has a sensory experience and the brain processes (organizes) the input, neural networks are formed. Your child chooses to engage in the arts during play because he or she instinctively knows the arts are the best way to develop the brain.

As a side note, these networks are largely completed by the age of 5, and after the age of 8, neural pathways that aren’t well traveled are pruned away. (Which is why children who learn a second language during the preschool years speak like natives, and most of us who didn’t take Spanish until high school will always sound like, well…embarrassing.)

Okay. Back to the arts. Arts, especially music, help wire the brain for the kind of learning that occurs in school after the age of seven.

The Encyclopedia Britannica says that art is “the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others.” Sharing the arts (group dances, playing instruments in ensemble, working together on a painting) enhances social skills.

The arts also develop essential thinking tools such as perception, attention, symbolic thinking, self-regulation, pattern recognition, reasoning, intuition, memory, differentiation, manipulation, encoding and decoding. Lots of big concepts, but what does this all translate to?

Your child’s painting and dancing and sculpting and especially music making in the preschool years, is the best thing you can do now to help your child later become an avid reader, a lover of math, a self-confident teenager, a curious chemist, a successful entrepreneur, and, of course, an accomplished musician.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who suggests taking inventory of your art baskets and music making and creating supplies this summer, and making sure they well stocked.

Tags: babies, brain, dancing, learning, Miss Analiisa, music, preschoolers, sensory systems

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Jun
24

Care for Refreshment? Start a Babysitting Co-op.

Posted in Bits and Pieces, Family, parenting, Things to do

I recently returned from a wedding weekend away. My husband and kids went to grandma’s house while I hopped on a plane. It was so refreshing. During the weekend, I spent some time encouraging an excited, but exhausted new mom. Her 3-month-old son was thriving under her watchful care, but she was…well…not. I could relate. It took me quite a while to find my balance when my first child came along. Like many new moms, I was desperate for refreshment, but found it hard to get.

In order to parent well, it is critical to figure out how to get regular refreshment! But how can we do it? One deterrent is that many of us believe that the only people who can give our child safe good care is a parent or relative. And many of us don’t have any relatives living nearby. With this line of thinking comes over-protection and burnout. In reality, when we think this way, we may end up limiting our child’s experiences because exposure to safe others will enrich his life more than we can alone! Even as an infant, our child can benefit from experiencing loving interaction from a variety of people.

I can hear many of your saying, “I’d love to take time for myself, but I just don’t know anyone to help.” Because I lived far away from my family, I experienced this acutely. While it takes time to develop trusted friendships when you don’t have family around, developing a network of close friends is essential for family health.

Getting out and being an initiator is key. One of my friends set the pace for this by organizing a babysitting co-op among the moms she knew and trusted from church and play activities she attended. She worked as an engineer before staying home with her children, and she found that she needed to get out more to be fulfilled at home and be a better parent, but she didn’t have a lot of family in the area.

She took action and started a babysitting co-op. Members of the babysitting co-op each received a number of “baby bucks.” Each buck was worth an hour of sitting. We’d call each other up and arrange sitting for doctor’s appointments, date nights, grocery shopping, whatever! When someone ran low on baby bucks they would invite other moms to drop off their kids to earn more bucks, especially if they had a theater night or dinner party, or other outing coming up.

Getting refreshed regularly is SO important for a parent. Find out what refreshes you and do it. Enlist the help of friends if needed. Take the initiative! A babysitting co-op is a great idea.

The exhausted new mom I spent time with at the wedding was doing such a great job. However I know she’ll need to take some time for herself again if she wants to maintain a healthy balance—which is critical to parenting at her best.

Posted by Donna Detweiler who would like to thank babysitting co-op creator Liana for her honesty, courage and initiative!