What I learned about a month after school started was that he just needed to use his musical brain in other ways.  He was practicing shapes and patterns one night at the kitchen table for homework when I glanced over and saw something amazing.  He was making music with math.  (Only a trained Kindermusik mom would notice this.)

His repetitive patterns with numbers sounded musical when I read them aloud.  It was more than just the typical 1-2-1-2-1-2.  It had rhythm.  I sent it to Miss Allison, our local Kindermusik scientific music specialist.  She also saw the beat and just for fun sent back the numbers in musical alphabet.

My kindergartener, without knowing, was continuing to make music.  His brain still retained his Kindermusik knowledge.  I played the mathematical notes on the recorder with the joy of one discovering the cure for the common cold.  He just snubbed his nose at me before dumping a pile of Legos on the floor.  I smiled.  There IS life after Kindermusik.

My kindergartener is not physically going to Kindermusik classes any more but after five years it was time for his brain to move on.  His brain was remembering and using what he learned for more than just silly dances and colorful shakers.

My anxiety decreased as I held his little brother’s hand to his first session of Imagine That.  The baby was now off to learn music in his own space, with his own friends.  Practicing his own independence.  Kissing time was a quick peck on the cheek as he ran by sideways.  On the way out the door I looked back .  Those baby snuggle days were over, but watching the singing and silly dancing happening at that moment without me was not the end.

Kindermusik was not just for the kids.  It’s been music for all of us.  We will still make up songs and dance silly in our own ways at home.  When classes are over at the end of the day, the music goes on.  At bedtime my boys, 6 and 4 years old, still wait for mama to give snuggles and sing “Hush Little Baby and Ally Bally.”  Life after Kindermusik?  Absolutely!

-posted by Kindermusik mama Heidi Forrester,  whose children now want to learn the electric guitar and the bassoon.

In fact, as I write this, I am sitting here doing my best to force motivate my violin player through his practice.  It’s not always easy. He’d rather be playing Xbox, or tug-a-war with his dog, or making up stories with his Halo Megabloks – anything but practicing. (Except, well, taking a shower and washing his hair, of course.)

But I know something he doesn’t. Finnish researchers (Did you know my maiden name was Koivisto? Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I like these scientists so much) have just developed a new method that shows the wide neural networks (including motor, emotions and creativity) that become activated all over the brain as music is listened to. Now scientists have an even better way to understand how music affects us.

Just like eating your vegetables and fish and getting enough vitamin D have a profound impact on my children’s physical health and development, regular music lessons/classes from an early age increases my children’s ability to learn. That’s a scientific fact, not just my opinion.

Here are a few examples of how scientists and researches believe music helps the brain:

• Studies have shown that music lessons/classes assist the brain to process sounds more efficiently. This means that when your child is trying to stay focused on reading a history text in a noisy classroom, he or she will have an easier time concentrating than a non lesson taker.
• Fast forward to a grown up job in one of those tiny cubicles. Multi-tasking and concentrating in a busy, loud office is an essential skill, one your violin player is much more likely to have.
• One researcher has found that the silence between two musical notes triggers the brain cells and neurons, which are responsible for the development of sharp memory.
• Other studies demonstrate that children who undergo musical training have a better verbal recall than those who have none. The amount of information that can be recalled increases the longer their period of musical training.
• Learning a second language is mandatory for high school graduation. Musicians are much better than non musicians at discerning the subtleties in pitch in foreign languages. This is especially helpful for tonal languages, like Mandarin.
• Coordination and concentration are also improved when a child takes instrument lessons. Think about what a flute player does all at the same time – moves both hands, reads music, listens to the players around him, watches the conductor – that’s a lot to coordinate!
• We know that music stimulates the areas of the brain that are responsible for planning and analyzing, thereby improving your organizational skills and making you more capable of handling math, reasoning and other cognitive tasks.
• And I think most importantly, when a child masters a piece of music or a difficult technique, it provides a sense of accomplishment, and gives a boost in confidence that spills over into all areas of life and produces a desire to tackle more challenges.

I want my children to grow up and have a good work ethic, an eagerness to try new things, the ability to reason and think, and the confidence that they can successfully navigate life.  The music they participate in now will help them accomplish just that.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who is going to make salmon burgers tomorrow night for dinner. After she wrestles her violin-playing 9 year old into the shower in the morning.

Can’t you just hear that song in your head right now?  I also remember sitting next to our stereo speaker, asking my dad over and over to replay “The Chipmunk Song” (Christmas Don’t Be Late).   Now, if you were a kid in America in 1958, (see picture of my older brother and me), the previous sentence should immediately trigger your memory to play that silly melody.

What song does this snowy picture immediately remind you of?  Yes, “Frosty the Snowman!” Did you brain “play” it for you when you thought of it?

This silent, “inner hearing”, or audiation, is the ability to “hear” music when no musical sound is present. When you audiate, you have internalized and are “thinking” music. For example, have you ever found yourself with a song “going through your head?” You’re audiating! Being able to hear music in this way is an important part of musical literacy, just as being able to think thoughts without speaking them aloud is an important in language and thought development.

Dr. Edwin Gordon defined audiation as “the hearing and comprehending of sound that is not physically present.” According to Gordon, “audiation is to music as thinking is to language.” Just as children babble before speaking and thinking in language, they also progress through steps in music before they fluently speak and think in music.

Tips for parents: This is a fun game to play with in the car, in the kitchen, or while cuddling on a lazy Saturday morning when the children pile in bed with you. Start singing a favorite song, and then stop before you sing the last note of a phrase or the end of the song. Wait and see if your child sings it for you. If he does, he is successfully “thinking music,” or hearing it in his head.  – Theresa Case

What I think is really cool, (being a music geek), is all the ways we can use this “inner hearing” in our everyday lives.  When someone asks you, “what is the 10^th letter of the alphabet?” your mind automatically plays the ABC song to help you find the letter “J.”  When faced with a word we do not recognize, we “sound out” the syllables in our heads to try to figure it out. (Like the word, “audiation”)!  We use familiar melodies to help children with everyday tasks when we sing, “toys away, toys away,” or “this is the way we brush our teeth.”

In Kindermusik classes, we practice “hearing the music inside” in many different ways:  Asking children what a bear or a train sounds like before playing the sound clip for them, leaving out successive words in “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,”  or the letters B-I-N-G-O in you-know-what song.  We take familiar melodies and change the words to suit the situation, as in “Got a Rock in my Pocket.”  We then use this song as a humming activity.  Humming is another way of “hearing the music inside,” as we usually think of the words of a song while making humming the notes.  We expose children to many types of music to provide them with a broad and varied musical vocabulary on which to build their future musical experiences.

And remember, when we share all these musical experiences together in class, whether playing drums to “African Noel,” dancing to “The Sugar Plum Fairy,” or rocking to Greensleeves, we are sharing all of our collected memories and feelings about that music with all the other children and grownups in class.  We all bring to each activity our own life experiences and are allowed to share in the joy of the moment with others, in addition to creating new ones for our children.

One more picture for you, so I’ll know what classic song is playing as your part of “listening to the music inside.”

-posted by Miss Judy, who constantly gets music “stuck” inside of her head, and loves it!

The special thing about this book is that it has excerpts from real moms who documented how they were feeling week by week as their baby was growing. They would also document what their babies were doing as the weeks were going by as well. Again, for me, this was reassurance to know that each baby has different temperaments and is going to grow differently.

Miles at 5 weeks.

Here’s an example: I remember when Miles hit the 5 week mark. He was very fussy and it was very hard to get him to sleep. He would put up the greatest fight to go down and sometime he never made it down. He just cried the whole time until his next feeding.

This is when I picked up The Wonder Weeks and started reading as fast as I could! Well, wouldn’t you know, 5 weeks is when babies have their first fussy time, which leads into a ‘magical leap forward’.

After we made it through the 5^th week, both my husband and I realized that Miles was actually responding to music and he was starting to notice and play with his hands! He had started showing off his new skills that he was processing through during his fussy time.  What a pleasure to be able to watch and participate in his learning.  We were able to enjoy this because we knew what to expect.

Another thing that has been helpful about  The Wonder Weeks, is that there is a graph in the beginning of the book that charts out predicted fussy times. I’m a visual person, so this is very nice. I can quickly flip to this chart and see where Miles fits age-wise and see if he is in a sunny period (his personality is shining through) or a stormy period (more fussy than normal).

Here is one last example: Miles has been really cranky lately. I’ve stopped telling people how many weeks he is because I just can’t keep track. So, when people ask how old he is I’ll say 3 ½ months instead of weeks. But because he has been so cranky lately, I decided to count the weeks and check the chart in this book. Sure enough, Miles is in a stormy period and things are changing.

Miles has been very testy when it comes to sleeping. He has been having a really hard time going down and we can’t figure it out. He also doesn’t like my husband putting him down. He will cry and cry and cry with Casey, but then I’ll take him and he’ll quiet right down. This process has been really rough for both Casey and I because Casey feels rejected and I feel like I don’t get a break.

Miles at 17 weeks.

After counting how many weeks old Miles is, 17 weeks, he falls smack in the middle of a fussy time. I should’ve known! So, I just opened the book to refresh my memory about some of the changes that are going to be happening to Miles and about every description in the book is exactly what Miles is going through. Trouble sleeping, being cranky, shyness of strangers, entertaining him while he is awake; all of these things are written in this book and documented by the Moms who participated in journaling what their child was doing during this time. Talk about not feeling alone!

I am so grateful for this book, The Wonder Weeks. It has helped me a lot with being patient with my baby and myself. It will be a go-to book for me as Miles grows and gets older.

-posted by Miss Anna, who will be recommending this book to every Mom that she knows, and thinks that if you get the chance, you should check it out.

In Spring and Summer, the outside world is chock full of colors, smells, tastes, sounds, and things to touch. By this time of year, socks and shoes are back on, mittens cover little fingers, and hats muffle noises.

Did you know that together, hands and feet have over 40,000 touch receptors? Pull off those socks and mittens and take advantage of those 40,000 learning possibilities! Here are some ideas:

Note: All of these work equally well for hands or feet. A tablecloth/oilcloth on the floor or bathtub work well for the feet activities, and a highchair tray or wax paper on a table is a perfect place to contain the mess made by experimenting little hands. Be sure to talk about what your little one is “feeling” (slippery, soft, rough, smooth, scratchy, bumpy).

• Squirt shaving cream or whipped cream onto feet, or in little mounds on a high chair tray for exploration.
• Put dried beans or breakfast cereal in a box or plastic tub. Place packing peanuts or crumpled paper in the other box. Let your little one stomp and jump and kick away. (With your help, a non-walker can do this, too.)
•  Make a box of ribbon and fabric scraps of various textures (satin, grosgrain, fleece, burlap, vinyl) for exploration.
• Take those ribbons and scraps of fabric, add some cotton balls, and put them on floor for your little one to crawl or walk across.
• Cook noodles, oatmeal, rice or jello. Name the different textures as you play with them.
• Mix cornstarch and water until you get a goop about the consistency of glue.  Add food coloring if you wish. This is a non-toxic mixture, so no worries if a little bit gets eaten.

This is not the time to try and contain the mess! Frequently, the messier the experience, the more is learned. Think about it – the more touch receptors (and other senses) that are involved, the stronger and more permanent the learning will be.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, whose favourite sensory activity involves sand between her toes.

Brain Rules for Baby

This Seattleite and UW professor opens his book by debunking a few of the parenting myths we have come to believe.  Taking on these preconceptions and misconceptions, Dr. Medina uses the latest in research (only peer-reviewed and successfully replicated) to fill the next nearly 300 pages with specific strategies towards raising a smart and happy child.

One thought-provoking and foundational insight having particular application to our Kindermusik classes is Medina’s proposition that the fundamental job of the baby’s brain is not to learn, but to survive!  “We do not survive so that we can learn.  We learn so that we can survive.”

Hence, our fundamental job as parents and teachers is not so much to provide a steady stream of baby educational dvds, flashcards or early childhood French lessons, as it is to provide an environment of safety where learning can happen. When the brain feels safe its busy neurons are free to complete the thousands of connections needed to fully wire the brain….but not until! 

So what are some of the things that affect the safety level of our children?

*Attachment – From the birth canal babies are looking for attachments, their brains acutely attentive to the care being received.  If essential needs are being met and healthy bonding (lots of touch and “face” time!) is occurring there is a positive outcome, if not, there is another outcome.

*Stress levels – A stressful environment (angry or emotionally violent, exhibiting relational/marital conflict) signals to baby a lack of safety. Dr Medina does a fantastic job of pinpointing and addressing particularly prenatal stress and marital conflict.  He provides solid insights to bring about change to both areas.

In our Kindermusik classes our first and primary goal is to signal “this is a safe environment” to all children.  From the welcome song where one discovers he or she not only “belongs” to this community, but is recognized as a valued individual, to the snuggle time where we turn back to receive the gentle care of a loved one, we sing and dance and snuggle our way to a place where learning can thrive and happy neurons connect at an alarming rate!

Take a moment for this online parenting quiz and discover what parenting myths you may be holding dear!

-posted by Miss Colleen, who suddenly realizes how grateful she is to have been born into a nearly television free world….Ah, the benefits of age!

Question: Is it typical for each class to be very similar each week? We’ve noticed that we are singing the same songs each week and I’m hoping that the class changes a bit from week to week. Could you let me know?

Answer:
Your question was both astute and excellent. That tells me that you are paying attention in class! (Which is wonderful, since seriously, I’ve had a few mommas that text the entire class time!)

While we as adults may quickly tire of an activity, it is important that we recognize the importance of repetition to our children’s learning. Learning, or the growth of neural connections in the brain, is strengthened through repetition. A one-time experience is not enough for a neural connection to form and stabilize. It is through repetition that possibility becomes ability. That is why Kindermusik activities are repeated over and over.

We will, however, do “extensions” of activities. The brain loves to be a little surprised once in a while; a surprise causes the brain to pay extra attention. One week we might sing a song, the next we’ll sing the song and add a manipulative. We might do the same lap bounce for 5 weeks in a row, but change up the words in the 4th or 5th week. This allows children to have mastery of an idea before we add a new one.

Three interesting facts :

1. Learning requires electrical energy to create neural pathways. The less “automatic” something is, the more electrical energy is required. Think of something you do automatically – like count by 10′s. It takes very little electrical energy for your brain to travel that “counting 10′s” neural pathway, because you’ve done it a lot.

The more well-traveled a pathway, the less energy is required. That’s why you can do two things at once. Watch TV and knit, for example. When you are first learning to knit, it takes all of your effort. Looking, counting stitches, watching your needles. As it becomes automatic, you use less brain energy, so you can layer another activity on top of that without fear of accidentally turning those mittens into a hat instead.

Communicating Neurons

2.  Did you ever wonder why children expect a favorite activity to be repeated again and again and again? Repetition is a necessary building block of development. Children’s brains KNOW that they need repetition. They are pretty smart little creatures! Do you remember the show Blue’s Clues? (Never the same for me after Steve left…). The creators did research while developing the show as to what preschoolers wanted to see in the show, and you can probably guess the answer by now – repetition!

3. So what about the fact that we always have a hello and goodbye ritual, a bounce, a steady beat, rocking time, and story time (in the older classes)? As my friend Heather Wiebe says (she a Kindermusik teacher in Alberta who is fascinated about the way the brain works, just like me) “Patterns make children happy.  Knowing what to expect and having things happen in that way not only helps children know what to expect and feel at ease, it’s also how they mark time.” When the environment and routine is predictable, then a child feels safe and learning can naturally happen.

We know you’ll be ready to move on to another activity before your children will (believe me, I’ve been there three times with my own kids!) know that you’ll get new music and activities soon enough. And a Kindermusik Education is the most powerful tool you can give them now, for future success in school, work and life.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who would love you to email her and let her know your questions. (She can’t read your minds, you know. She does have eyes in the back of her head, but not mind-reading powers. Though now that her children are getting older, wonders if she can trade those extra eyes in for psychic abilities. Or maybe she doesn’t want to know what is going on in there!)

This final chapter in Medina’s book is on the innate exploratory nature of human beings. It starts at birth.  Babies are little scientists, he explains.  Their behavior from the womb is driven by their curiosity.  He describes how he did an experiment with his newborn, discovering that this little baby would imitate his dad when he stuck out his tongue—at 30 minutes old.  Mirror neurons residing in the brain are “cells whose activity reflects their surroundings.” In other words, our brains have cells that allow us to quickly imitate a behavior we have seen for the first time. That’s some fast track learning.

But according to Medina, our brains are meant to continue to explore for a lifetime. “Researchers have shown that some regions of the adult brain stay as malleable as a baby’s brain, so we can grow new connections, strengthen exiting connections and even create new neurons, allowing all of us to be lifelong learners.” Most of us know some of these amazing senior citizens whose brains can run circles around their juniors.  My aunt was one of those. Curious until her body failed, she was a classic addicted-to-learning person. And she was so fun to be around because she was so alive.  She asked questions and made interesting observations and had great sense of humor too.  Her brain was making new neural connections until it quit.  I’m convinced of it.

The fuel for all learning is curiosity.  Medina points us back to children. They are inherently curious. They are constant learners. During most of their early years, they are “little scientists,” Medina explains. They are asking questions, forming hypothesis, conducting experiments, noting the results and repeating them.  For example: What will happen if I push my bowl of spaghetti off the edge of the tray?  There it goes!  That was fun. I got a lot of attention and I liked how the sound and the way the stuff flew. I wonder what will happen if I do that again?

A sense of wonder or curiosity is the final subject of Medina’s book. He believes it is the most important brain rule of all!  As a research scientist and educator, his passion is learning.  He was encouraged by his mother to stoke the fuel of his curiosity, and he has. And he wants us to as well, in how we raise our children, run our businesses and develop our education system. If we follow the science of brain rules, we’ll find joy, he concludes.

“For little ones, discovery brings joy. Like an addictive drug, exploration increases the need for more discovery so that more joy can be experienced. It’s a straight up reward system that, if allowed to flourish, will continue into the school years. As children get older, they find that learning not only brings them joy, but it also brings them mastery. Expertise in specific subjects breeds the confidence to take intellectual risks. If these kids don’t end up in the emergency room, they may end up with a Nobel Prize.”

Thanks for a great book, John. I learned a lot!

-posted by Donna Detweiler, who finds homeschooling is a sneaky way to keep on learning as an adult.

Take a standard American march like Stars and Stripes. A march has a steady, predictable beat. If you were to clap along, you would automatically clap on beats 1 and 3(unless you were the tuba player – who has the syncopation on beats 2 and 4).

Our brains love steady beats, because the brain loves to find patterns and sequences. In fact, if you listen to music that has a steady, predictable beat (like that march I mentioned), after a while, your neurons actually begin firing at the same rate as the beat of the march.

But as humans, we like patterns only up to a point. After that comes boredom, and we stop paying attention. But when the pattern changes, we begin paying attention again. Syncopation tickles our brains, so to speak. Our brains search for the new pattern, and the sense of unpredictability that comes with change is fun and interesting to both your brain and your soul.

Think about it – when you hear syncopated African or Latin music or Jazz – it makes you want to smile and move, right? The beat is unexpected and interesting.  Take a listen to Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock”.  In Village class, we’ve been listening to the jazzy Hop to It. That’s syncopated, too.

But what does this have to do with your little one? Let me explain. You want your child to eat a wide variety of foods, to like an assortment of flavors, textures, colors and shapes. Even if they ask for the steady, predictable mac-n-cheese and chicken nuggets every night, you still want them to have a balanced diet.

The same is true for music.  Our children need a variety of musical experiences. Life is richer and more interesting with a varied diet of music. And some brain tickling.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who has been feeling rather bored the last couple of days, and feels in need of a brain tickle in the form a new project of some sort.

The chapter on how our brains become wired is mind blowing.  That’s a bad pun, but it’s true!  As learning takes place, neural connections blow apart, or split, creating new connections. Like a highway system continually under construction, more learning equals more complex neural connections crisscrossing the brain. More is good! Medina points out interesting research done on the brains of violin performers for example.  Their brains resembled Seattle’s Spaghetti Bowl (For you non-Seattle readers, it is a complex section of highway on and off ramps south of town.)

It all starts at infancy, when the brain is hyper-developing.  A three-year-old’s brain has two to three times the neural connections in specific regions.  But he doesn’t get to keep them.  Interestingly, by the time the child reaches eight, his brain development is “pruned” and back to normal.  Then in puberty, another phase of frenetic neural growth happens until age 18 is reached. Doesn’t that explain a lot!

Just as kids come in all shapes and sizes in spite of age, Medina is quick to point out that brains develop as uniquely as bodies.  Early and late bloomers are encompassed in “normal,” even with respect to the brain. However, what we learn creates a unique neural configuration. So our brains are customized based on our experiences, like the violin player’s.  The modern science of brain mapping, where scientists can track the neurons firing (called “lighting up”), showed that even twins have individualized brains because of their unique responses to similar events.

Messy World of Brain Development

Every brain learns differently, concludes Medina and other brain researchers.  One neurosurgeon, Howard Gardner, wrote a book about his findings. Called Frames of Mind; the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Gardner suggests other intelligences besides the old IQ measurement exist. His list includes: Verbal/linguistic, musical/rhythmic, logical/math, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal/intrapersonal, and nature.  Logically, different brain configurations would equal different skill sets. Brain surgeon, George Ojemann, maps brains and then does surgery to allow epileptic patients to get relief from seizures. As he stimulates different regions of the brain to find the trouble areas, he has observed that no universal regions for specific functions exist in the brain. That means that approximately 7 billion unique brains inhabit planet earth today.

Brain research merely reveals something we parents and teachers already know.  There are no two kids under our roofs, in our classrooms, or in our neighborhoods that are exactly alike. And as we pour our hearts into educating our kids to the best of our abilities, it is a very inexact science.  Medina concludes that exact thing:  “The ability to understand the interior motivations of someone else and the ability to construct a predictable theory of how their mind works based on that knowledge” is what is needed to help students learn.  We need to be students of our students!  And that takes time and proximity.  As we live and work with our kids, experience will help us discern the best ways for “teaching to be transformed into learning.”

Remember my failed experience teaching my daughter about Johnny Appleseed?  What I’ve learned about brain wiring tells me that it’s ok that my kid’s learning process is messy. My daughter’s singular after-class memory of “Jerry Somebody” provides clues into how her brain works. As I continue to observe how she learns best, it will lead to more insights and a better learning experience. My expectations are shifting as I understand there are no teaching formulas.  Finesse and success will come with experience.  And that’s what has given me an excitement equaling a coffee buzz!

-posted by Donna Detweiler, who finds the uniqueness of brains both exhilarating and exasperating!