Studio3Music Blog

Posts Tagged ‘babies’

May
12

Peter’s Story

Posted in Bits and Pieces, Things We Love, Village

He was in our Village class for such a short time….I’ll call him Peter. Just a few weeks to enjoy the waning days of Rhythm of Our Day and a little Busy Days, but in that short time we saw a flower open.

I remember his first visit to our class. Peter brought Mommy, Daddy, and Auntie with him and all were intently focused on Peter; his every move mattered. Any indication of pleasure or displeasure a one year old could convey was noted and evaluated. There were tears as he clung to Mommy, not knowing what to make of the wiggling bunch of bouncers and shakers surrounding him. “Peter doesn’t usually hear English spoken in his home.” But there were many hands to console….six to be exact! “I think we’d like to join this class…at least for a little while. They are only here for a short time,” said Auntie.

Only Mommy & Daddy came along next week to shore up little Peter. Fewer tears, but still well sheltered by slightly anxious parents, Peter’s fearful gaze seldom came my way. Mommy and Daddy quietly tapped his tiny hand keeping the steady beat he was not ready to feel.

Week 4: Peter brought only Mommy this week. Timid hands reached outside the cozy confines of Mommy’s legs to pick up a bright red shaker. Mommy and Peter stayed around after class to enjoy the chatter of their cohorts.

Today: Peter sat happily in his white plastic carriage…which looked remarkably like a Target laundry basket. Even a ride to the “Doctors office” wasn’t so bad if all your friends were going, too! The sudden stops for red lights created a palpable tension in the circle and even Peter’s gaze turned towards me in anticipation. Snug in his green towel, he peered out at those around him as if he had been doing this forever….well, for at least 3 weeks. Time to dance! I stood opposite Peter and Mommy. We swayed happily to Mama Paquita, do-si-doed a sly peek-a-boo, and as we met in the middle to say “hello”, Peter giggled and gave me the biggest smile ever!

It’s a friendly and chatty class who linger long, but Mommy and Peter were the last to leave today. Mommy quietly and shyly said, “This is our last class, Miss Colleen. We will be moving far away next week. I just want you to know Peter is much different child now. He loves class. He loves you. Thank you for my child happy now.”

-posted by Miss Colleen, who is happy, too.

Tags: babies, kindermusik, learning, Miss Colleen

Join the conversation

Apr
19

I found my hands. Let’s play some games!

Posted in Child Development, Games for Babies, parenting, Things to do

Classic "Airplane Baby"

4 to 6 months
One of the biggest changes that will occur during these months is that the parts of your baby’s brain that coordinate sight and touch are now integrating the incoming sensory information. This enables your baby to figure out where her hands are in space (thanks to the proprioceptive system), and make them do what she wants.

With the beginnings of depth-perception, this sight/touch sensory integration means he can reach for an object and pick it up. By about 6 months, he is also able to rotate his wrists, and thus manipulate objects.

What to watch for: These are the signs that your baby’s brain is organizing sensory input exactly as it should.

Banging objects and toys. (Against the floor, or two objects together.)
Spontaneous bringing together in a clapping motion of her hands in front of her body. This is the first sign of coordination between both sides of her body. To assist in this developmental milestone, you can play clapping games with your baby even before she can play them by herself.

Ram Sam Sam is a children’s song that originated in Morocco, and was a favorite clapping game of my children when they were infants and toddlers, especially on the changing table. You can listen to the song here,

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

and download it directly at play.kindermusik.com.

A ram sam sam, a ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
Guli guli guli guli guli (roll your baby’s hands or bicycle his legs)
ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
A ram sam sam, a ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
Guli guli guli guli guli (roll your baby’s hands or bicycle his legs)
ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
A ra-vi, a ra-vi (lift your baby’s arms over his head, or fold his legs up toward his head)
Guli guli guli guli guli (roll your baby’s hands or bicycle his legs)
ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)
A ra-vi, a ra-vi (lift your baby’s arms over his head, or fold his legs up toward his head)
Guli guli guli guli guli (roll your baby’s hands or bicycle his legs)
ram sam sam (clap your baby’s hands or feet together as you sing)

Touch Me
As babies begin to coordinate sight and touch, they delight in “touching” games. Here’s a fun naming game to play. (And yes, babies can begin to learn body part labels, even if they can’t yet speak the words!) I found many versions of the lyrics brought to the US by immigrants from all over Europe. Many people commented that this was a beloved touch game played with grandparents, even at 4 or 5 years of age. Here are a couple of versions:

Here is where the coachman sits (touch baby’s forehead)
Here is where he cracks his whip (touch bridge of nose)
Eye winker (touch or circle one eye)
Tom tinker (touch or circle the other eye)
Nose breather (touch nose)
Mouth eater (touch mouth)
Chin chopper (touch chin)
Gully, gully, gully (tickle under chin)

Here sits the Lord Mayor (touch baby’s forehead)
Here sits his two men (touch eyes)
Here sits the rooster (touch cheek)
Here sits the hen (touch other cheek)
Here sits the chickens (touch nose)
Here they run in (touch mouth)
Chin-chopper, chin-chopper,
Chin-chopper, chin! (tickle under chin)

Airplane Baby
At about 6 months, a baby on his tummy really feels the pull of gravity, which gives baby a strong desire to lift up his head, neck, upper back, arms and legs all at the same time, resulting in the classic “airplane” position.

Babies at this age want and need to have their vestibular systems stimulated by rocking, swooshing, twirling, swinging and other similar movements. One word of caution – every person (grownups, too!) has a level of moment they can tolerate, and it’s different for everyone. If your baby begins to cry during a moving game, this means that the play has become too rough or wild for your baby’s vestibular system to handle, and the level of play is actually causing her brain to disorganize.

Hold your baby firmly around her body, tummy down, in a horizontal position. Take off! Fly your baby around the room, swooshing, dipping, spinning, rolling, starting, stopping as it pleases your baby. Be sure to make airplane sounds! If you would like some musical inspiration, download Run and Jump/Soaring from play.kindermusik.com.

As your baby turns into a toddler and preschooler, lie on your back on the floor and bend your knees with your feet off the floor. Have your child place his tummy against the bottoms of your feet. Hold onto your child’s hands. Lift your child up towards the ceiling as you raise your feet and fly!

-posted by Miss Analiisa, whose 9 year old Rob would love to still play airplane on her feet, but at 86 pounds, would likely crush the lift-off mechanism.

Tags: babies, brain, games, kindermusik, learning, Miss Analiisa, physical development, sensory systems, Things to do, touch, vestibular system

Join the conversation

Apr
13

Two and Three Months: From Head to Hands

Posted in Child Development, parenting

I was going to call this “From Head to Toe”, as a baby’s motor skills start with her head and eventually make their way down to her toes, but by three months, motor skills have only really made it as far as her fingers, and even then, not really well.

Nathan thinking that the best way to help his 3 month old brother to have a steady head is to hold him up by the ear...

From Head

If you remember from the last blog on month one of your infant’s life, the head and neck are the first body parts a baby learns to control. This ability aids in visual perception. In order to be able to focus your eyes on an object, you have to be able to hold the image still, even when your head or body or the object is moving.

In addition, to see clearly, the brain has to coordinate gravity and movement sensations from the inner ear (the vestibular system), and sensations from eye and neck muscles. Babies are born with all the necessary pieces of the visual system in place, but can’t use them properly yet. They have to literally learn to see.

At first, infants have to move their whole head to move their eyes. But around 2 to 3 months, infants learn how to shift their gaze from one object to another without having to move their head. (As a side note, it’s not until between 4 and 6 months that babies can see the colors blue or violet. So when your 3 month old doesn’t jump for joy every time she sees those purple striped nursery walls you so carefully hand-painted, just wait a month or two.)

Just as the sensations of gravity stimulated the part of the brain that activated the neck muscles of the one month old, the same sensations stimulate the brain to contract the muscles in the upper back of a 2 and 3 month old. Your baby is literally commanded by his brain to raise up his head and upper body when laying his tummy.

Since your baby’s brain is stimulating those muscles, tummy time becomes of utmost importance. I remember Rob’s Occupational Therapist saying how important tummy time was for developing muscles in the back and shoulders, and that she was seeing a lot of Kindergarten and early elementary aged children for fine motor skill issues, and the connection between them seemed to be a lack of tummy time as infants.

One word of encouragement – if your baby doesn’t like tummy time, that’s okay. Keep trying. Frustration is the catalyst for change. Meaning… she’ll to pull her head and neck up with enough practice, because she doesn’t really want to see the carpet; she wants to see what is around her.

To Hands

As an infant begins to see better, he begins to reach for the objects and people in his space. Unfortunately, hand-eye coordination isn’t very well developed at this point, so he appears to be “batting” at objects with open hands.

When he does grasp something you put into his hand, he’ll only uses three fingers and the palm of his hand (not his forefinger and thumb). The touch sensations have yet to integrate with the sensations in his muscles and joints in his hands, but when that happens, he’ll be able to make that pincer grasp he will eventually need for the glockenspiel mallets in Young Child!

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who is amazed that children can go from floppy to walking in just 12 short months.

Tags: babies, brain, Miss Analiisa, parenting, physical development, sensory systems

One response so far, share yours!

Mar
25

The Brain’s Busy First Month

Posted in Child Development

Last time I wrote about sensory integration, I told you what happens by the age of 7 if a brain is well organized. Now, I’m going to start at the beginning and tell you how it all progresses until then.

A Newborn’s Brain
At birth, an infant possesses all the neurons he or she will ever have (billions of them), and a nearly unlimited potential for connections between those nerve cells. They begin the process of brain development with nerve cells that have very sparse branches. During the first few years of life the dendrites (branches) of the nerve cells proliferate. Making these new neural connections is the basis for learning.

Rob at 2 weeks

Touch
A newborn can experience sensations (like the unpleasantness of a wet diaper), or the touch of his mom, but without these neural connections, he can’t tell very well where on his body the touch is occurring.

At this age, touching an infant is the most important thing you can do to help brain development. Every time an infant has a sensory experience, neural pathways are formed. The greater the number of neural pathways, the greater the brain power.

As any mom can tell you, infants loved to be carried and rocked. It is very soothing and calming to a baby. Why? The gentle movements she feels are actually helping to integrate her brain. The clue that this is happening? She’s happy. Her little brain is beginning to organize all the sensory input and thus learn to adapt to her environment. This makes her calm and happy.

Adaptive Responses
An “adaptive response” is defined as “an appropriate response to an environmental demand”. Here’s how it works in newborn as the brain begins to organize itself. If you put a four week old with her head on your shoulder, she’ll try to lift her head occasionally.

Gravity actually stimulates the part of her brain that activates the neck muscles that raise her head. The same thing happens with adults, but we’ve had so much practice at holding our heads upright that we don’t wobble. (And our muscles are stronger, too.)

By the time a baby is a month old, a baby should be pretty good at sucking. Sucking is an adaptive response to taste and smell, which scientists believe were pretty well organized at birth. A one month old will also be responding to the sound of a voice or bell or movement. These responses were already in the nervous system before he was born, but are actually “turned on” by the sensations of movement, touch and gravity that an infant experiences after birth.

If these adaptive responses don’t occur, the brain can’t integrate sensations properly. If that happens, then more adaptive responses (learning) are difficult later.

Rob’s Story
Here’s an illustration: Rob is our own sensory child. After two years of therapy, we hit a plateau that no amount of different therapies could get us past. When we took him to see a Sensori-Motor Developmentalist, he told us that Rob was missing a reflex that all infants should be born with. When an infant is sleeping on his tummy, one arm will usually be bent at the elbow and raised up next to his head. His head will be turned toward the bent arm.

If you put that arm down next to his body, and put the other hand next to his head (while sleeping), he will automatically turn his head toward the bent arm. In Rob, that wasn’t an automatic reflex. Just try this on yourself (while you are awake!) You’ll find it very uncomfortable NOT to have your head turned toward your upright arm.

For weeks, we moved Rob’s arm’s and legs in a Spiderman-like pattern while he lay on the floor on his tummy, until he could do it himself easily in all sorts of variations. We were essentially creating the neural pathways for this reflex. And guess what? He got “unstuck” and could then continue developing his adaptive responses and learn. And an organized brain leads to happiness. (Remember the infant you rocked?)

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who gets tired just thinking about how much work a one month old infant is doing!

Tags: babies, brain, learning, Miss Analiisa, physical development, sensory child, sensory systems

2 responses so far, join the conversation!

Nov
18

New Mommies Brains Grow Bigger

Posted in Bits and Pieces, parenting

I always said that I lost brain cells with each child I delivered. It’s been my excuse over the last 12 years for all the information and appointments and tasks that seem to fall out of my head. However, some recent research I read seems to contradict that idea.

A recent Science Daily article says this, “Motherhood may actually cause the brain to grow, not turn it into mush, as some have claimed. Exploratory research published by the American Psychological Association found that the brains of new mothers bulked up in areas linked to motivation and behavior, and that mothers who gushed the most about their babies showed the greatest growth in key parts of the mid-brain.”

The authors of the study proposed the idea that all the hormonal changes after birth allow mother’s brains to reshape in response to their baby, and the instinct and drive mothers have to take care of their infant is the result of brain growth.

The researchers performed brain scans on women several weeks after birth, and again at 3 to 4 months post partum. They found that the mothers who most enthusiastically described their infants as wonderful, perfect, precious, beautiful, etc., were significantly more likely to have growth in the gray matter of their brains linked to maternal motivation, rewards and the regulation of emotions.

What made the authors believe that this brain growth was linked to motherhood was the fact that in adults, gray matter volume doesn’t normally transform over a few months without significant learning, brain injury or illness, or major environmental change.

So the questions arose. Does the constant touching, holding, cuddling, between a mother and baby cause her brain to “orchestrate a new and increased repertoire of complex interactive behaviors” with her baby?

Does growth in the brain’s “motivation” area lead to more nurturing by the new mommy, which in turn helps her baby thrive? Does behavior change the brain, or brain change behavior?

Finally, is it possible that post-partum depression reduce the same areas in the brain that grew in the non-depressed moms? Is there something in these findings that could help them?

More research is definitely needed. But these results are interesting, to say the least. So in the meantime, go ahead enthusiastically gush about your baby to everyone!

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who recommends that you continue to enthuse about your children when they are older. It’s beneficial for both of you.