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!

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.

Are we talking about the minute machinations we all do with our lips, teeth, tongue, and our hard and soft palettes to form phonemes?

Or do we mean the inflections in spoken language that tell a listener we are asking a question or telling a joke?

YES! Vocal development is all of these things.

I have dozens of activities I love to do in class to nurture vocal development, but I’m going to limit myself to just one today.

It’s the little ditty Above the Sea, aka “the song with the bathtub fish”. I love those fish because they open the door to world of vocal development for your child in a tangible and engaging way?

What makes this song and fish so special?

It’s a story song.  Songs that tell stories engage children in a deeper way by growing and developing and changing. They have characters to connect with, so the child’s emotions are brought into play.  This gives us a song the child is more interested in participating with.

Above the Sea has a conversation, and the song’s melodic pattern also mimics that conversation.  When we ask a question, our pitch will naturally slide up at the end of the sentence. When Little Fish asks “What’s above the sea?”, the pitch moves up as well.  So, when we sing this story we are helping our child to understand how people use language to communicate with each other.

Above the Sea also develops your child’s ability to produce spoken words.  Singing is often easier for a child than speaking, because singing is slower and more deliberate.  Syllables are broken down and clearly pronounced when you sing; consonants are enunciated and vowels are drawn out.

What will often times pass by in a blur in spoken word will be clearly heard and understood when sung.   Now they can use those words in other parts of their life, and they can sing along with the song, too.

Each of the sung patterns has visual components to accompany them. The fish face each other when they talk, and I always wiggle the fish who is talking at that moment. When they go up to the top of the sea, we all swim our fish up and sing up a scale at the same time -nice little auditory/visual connection there!

When the fish come back down, our voices descend the scale, too.  The kids can clearly see/hear/feel the patterns in the song.  The more senses we include in the learning process the deeper the learning is!

My favorite part is the verse in the middle whose words we can change.  Does your child love sharks? See the shark- hear him bark, his teeth are so scary!

Dinosaurs? See the dinosaur – and hear her roar, I think her name’s Marie!

What about Lightening McQueen? See Lightening McQueen – hear his engine scream, He’ll win the Grand Prix!

Come to class and sing me your verses. I’d love to hear them!

So go ahead – sing a fishy song with your child today to encourage their vocal development. By all means, play with your words! They are the best and cheapest toys our children will ever have. And, unlike plastic sharks and dinosaurs and Lightening McQueen cars, they will last the longest.

-posted by Miss Allison, who adores words, spoken, sung and written.

But you’re not 7 anymore, are you? And the kind of organizing you need may involve integrating your family’s weekly schedule, or sales numbers in your job, or keeping track of which IP address belongs to which server.

Music is full of structure and patterns and logic, which is exactly what your brain needs to help organize all that information into the proper neurological folders and files. Want proof? Just ask Albert Einstein. His mother was told by his school that he was stupid, and that she should withdraw him. Instead, his mother bought him a violin, and we know him as one of the smartest men in history.

To what does Einstein credit that? Yup. The violin. (His momma should get some of that credit, too.) He said that he worked out problems that he was stuck on by playing his violin. He loved the music of Mozart and Bach the most.

What is the connection between Classical and Baroque music and being organized? I can tell you! I took 5 years of music history, and 5 years of music theory in college 20 years ago, and I apparently haven’t forgotten everything. The music from those time periods is all about math. There are all sorts of rules and patterns and sequences you have to follow when writing in those musical styles. (And can’t be broken if you ever want an “A” in the 18^th Century Tonal Counterpoint class taught by Dr. Rutschmann.) Classical and Baroque music in it’s composition is very structured and organized.

One of the rules is that you don’t repeat a theme over and over again. Instead, you have a theme, and then variations on that theme. Dr. Michael Ballam of Utah State University says, “The human mind shuts down after three or four repetitions of a rhythm, or a melody, or a harmonic progression.”

Take the story of King George I of England, who ruled much of the world. He had a lot on his mind! He struggled with remembering things, stress, sleeping troubles, depression, and in general making mistakes due to all that. He read the story of King Saul from the bible (who seemed to George very much like himself.) George discovered that the shepherd boy David (of David and Goliath fame), could calm King Saul (translate – “organize his brain so he could think clearly”) with music.

George wondered if music could do the same thing for him. He sent for George Frederick Handel and asked. Thus, Handel’s Water Music was composed.

Now, no promises that your house will magically declutter itself if you put some Bach or Haydn on. But if you need to start thinking clearly, give it a try. You might actually discover a piece that you like. Your brain will pick the one it needs!

­-posted by Miss Analiisa, who now knows why she always is drawn to play Mozart’s Symphony no. 41 in C major in the background when she’s working on a major project and it’s not going very well.

I love that when I looked around at the concertgoers, there was people of every color and every age. From little children to the elderly. Why? When she performed, she wasn’t selling sex with her dance moves. She didn’t have a fancy set, or pyrotechnics, and she remained in the same outfit the whole time. There wasn’t a 3 foot tall green beehive of hair on her head, and the banter seemed totally random and unscripted.

Yet when Alison sang sad songs, I wanted to weep, and at other times my soul felt pure joy. That is the power of music. Simple and unadorned.

I run a business; I am both principal and teacher in our home school. I am the alpha female (just ask our beagle, Buddy).  I can move people – (Get in the car. Get In The Car. GET IN THE CAR RIGHT NOW!). I have power over many things in my life. I am a mover and a shaker. And yet…

I can unlock my children’s minds, but I cannot unlock their souls. And so, I think, God created music.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who encourages you to listen to something that moves you today, even if it is by a performer with a three foot tall green beehive.

I digress. We’ve known from ancient times that music can heal. But did you know that all over the world, thousands of people listen to their own brain’s “music” to heal themselves? In brain music therapy, brain waves from an individual’s brain (captured through an EEG) can be converted into musical sounds through a complex mathematical formula and a computer, and used to treat insomnia, anxiety, migraines, and depression, even allowing patients to discontinue their medication.

In fact, studies show that brain music therapy works in 80 to 85% of patients who have tried it. (You really have to listen to your own brain’s music to be this effective – everyone’s sounds different, and your own brain produces the music best for you.) Dr. Mindlin says that your brain recognizes its own brain waves when you listen to your brain’s “music”.

But it’s not just for depression and migraines. Brain music therapy is said to heighten concentration, and elevated productivity, energy, and peak performance (especially in athletes). Musicians and artists have said that they experience increased creativity.

What does it sound like? Like classical piano, actually. Here’s an example.

The idea that your brain can make its own “music” that can either relax or stimulate its owner doesn’t surprise me in the least. In all I’ve read and experienced about sensory processing in children, our brains know exactly what we need, and children with or without sensory processing disorders crave activities that help the brain organize itself. And children find great pleasure and satisfaction in those activities.

For more information, visit Dr. Mindlin’s site – Brain Music Therapy.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who should, by now, really stop being surprised and amazed by the complexity of our brains. And wonders what her own brain music would sound like…

I looked around me and noticed the crowd was young, and very excited about the music being played.  Is this the new generation of classical music?  I do not believe it is time to tell Bach and Mozart to move over, but the names  Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori, (the composers of the Halo soundtracks for Bungie) are becoming household legends.

Interestingly enough, they are also the same men who wrote the famous jingle for the Flintstone Vitamins that many of us today can sing by heart (for you trivia lovers).   Many other video game composers, such as those for Assassins Creed, Final Fantasy, Zelda, Mario Brothers and even old school arcade games were displayed and honored for their art and talent.

The experience was phenomenal, and I really appreciated Tommy Tallarico, composer and creator of Video Games Live, taking moments throughout the show to foster a love of music for the young crowd that was present.  He was reaching out to all the young people and igniting a flame for classical music in a new and different way.

My oldest, who is 8, is taking private classical guitar lessons and is trying to figure out the meaning behind why he should appreciate this style of music.  I showed him the trailer for Video Games Live and he decided right then and there, he wanted to be a musician so that perhaps, one day, he too, could play theme music to all his favorite video games….and maybe even write one, too.

I encourage you to take 5 minutes out of your day and check out the trailer for Video Games Live on their website:  www.videogameslive.com.  The first part is dialogue with the creators, but the last part shows clips from the concert.  The music through the whole trailer is a piece from the concert, including the opera vocals.  Show your video-playing children, so they can appreciate the music and special effects.  You can also find all sorts of video clips on YouTube.

Now, for all those nay-sayers that go around believing video games dull the mind and do not encourage anything academic or educational, there is inspiration here that is flaming the hearts of younger generations and creating an appreciation for the classical arts, bringing the old and the new together in a beautiful melody.

-posted by Miss Jesikah, who loves listening to her children’s operatic rendition of the Super Smash Bros. theme song while declaring they want to be opera singers…all because of a video game.

Your number one priority for your children is not getting food on the table at a particular time…it’s to continually train them. Don’t neglect this responsibility simply because you are being task-orientated at the moment. If dinner is burned one night because you had to divert your attention from the stove top to the squabbling siblings in the living room, perhaps a burnt meal is just the cure your kids need. (You just get to grin and bear the burnt food, too. Consider it a practice in not complaining.)

Once you actually get the food to the table, a myriad of other problems can arise. Following are a few ideas for some common mealtime problems.

“Yuck. I hate Brussels sprouts and pork chops.” Hmmm…tomorrow night, instead of Brussels sprouts and pork chops, how about serving a Mozambique dinner instead…a small cake-bread made of maize. Perhaps sprouts and chops won’t taste so yucky next time.Too many conversations. Mealtime can (and should!) be a time for developing the family bonds…that can’t be done if everyone is talking at the same time. Teach your children to listen first…is someone else in the middle of a sentence? Train them to wait their turn. This takes some time to implement with younger children, but it can be done. Always remember that telling your children something once is not training them. Consider athletes…did Sasha Cohen’s coach simply tell her how to do a triple Salchow and then she went out and flawlessly executed it? No…she had to practice it over and over. Your children will need to practice not interrupting in order to learn the skill.

Direct the conversation. Consider having a daily question that each person takes a turn to answer. Simple questions from “What fun thing did you do today?” to more thought provoking questions “If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would it be?” are fun ways to facilitate discussion. Or, take some time one afternoon and have your kids write questions on 3×5 cards. Keep the cards near the napkins and select a card or two each evening. To decide who speaks first, simply going around the table, going oldest to youngest, or in birthday order (January, February, etc) are simple ways to make sure everyone will get their turn to answer.

Jack-in-the-Boxes. If staying in his seat is a challenge for one of your children, you need to correct this habit right away because it is contagious. Once one child is allowed to get up from the table without permission, the others will soon follow. Don’t buy their excuses “I just need to go get this…” “I just have to…” Teach your children to ask before they get up (keep in mind I’m not simply talking about after the meal, I’m talking about during it).

As you’ve probably experienced, young children rarely have a reason to get up…they just do it. If there is something your child needs, teach them to ask. “Mommy, may I please get up and get a spoon to eat my corn with?” rather than a child just getting up and heading who knows where (ok, he knows he’s heading to the spoon drawer, but he needs to ask first).  Some solutions I’ve known moms to do: take away the chair of a child who can’t sit in it and require him to eat standing up; take away a favorite evening time privilege (no video or computer time, 15 minutes earlier to bed, etc); or remove the child to a different room—eating dinner “in exile” on a TV tray facing the kitchen wall is an appropriate response to a child whose constant up and down is a distraction to others.

- posted by Donna Venning, who recently spent an entire dinner conversation discussing what Lego bricks one would need to make a meal out of Lego.  Too bad Lego doesn’t make broccoli shaped pieces!

I hear regularly from parents that the CD’s are a staple of all commuting, and that they are listened to at home, and at bedtime as well because their child will actually LISTEN to the CD’s over and over again.

My gut instinct tells me that they listen to their curriculum CD’s with such attentiveness because almost every song on the CD is related to an activity from class; memories when they listen to “Walk Along Rover”…. They are doing the steps of the dance in their heads when they hear “Jing Jang” or “Little Liza Jane”, and their hands become a rabbit and hop along their arms,  their finger-ears flop, flop, flop, and their bunny eyes blink, blink, blink, and their bunny noses twink, twink, twink, as they listen to “I Saw a Little Rabbit.”  A Kindermusik CD for an enrolled child is a doorway back to the classroom.

It is not just background music.  I am quite sure if you gave a Kindermusik CD to a child who had never attended a class that they would enjoy the CD, but not like your children will.  The combination of meat and potatoes followed by dessert is classic for a reason - it works!

Your child may not actually be interested in the CD at first; they may still want to listen to last semester’s CDs. But as soon as we’ve covered enough of the music on the CD with activities in class, your child will begin the process of transferring their love from Milk and Cookies to Fiddle Dee Dee.  Most of the music on the CD is in a similar order to how it is introduced in class.

There are always tracks on a Kindermusik CD that we won’t use in class. These pieces are there to round out your child’s listening experience and to expose them to music they may not hear regularly.  They also make the CD much more interesting to listen to.

However, these short forays into the unheard are important for another reason; they act like a recess for the child’s brain, which is working and learning while they are listening to the familiar classroom songs.  Children need down-time to process what they have learned while they are in the throes of discovery.

Quiet time on the CD (whether it’s a short piece of classical music or a poem) gives them a few minutes to download before the next spurt of learning begins.  This is why recess really is the most important part of your child’s school day, and why as college students we needed to take a break from studying every so often.  Research shows that studying for extended periods of time is counter-productive.  Every brain needs time off to process information.

Both of your story-books for the semester are also read on your CD’s. “The Animal Serenade” is on CD 1, and “This Little Piggy Played the Fiddle” is found on CD 2.  (You’ll hear the voice of the founder of Kindermusik reading this book, and you’ll hear his rich bass serenading you throughout the Kindermusik repertoire of CD’s.)

On the CDs  are several samples from the classical repertoire. The Scherzo from Shubert’s Trout Quintet, and The Flight of the Bumble Bee, by Rimsky Korsakov. I highly recommend Korsakov’s music, especially Scheherazade; it’s one of my all time favorite pieces of classical music.

Since Fiddle Dee Dee places an emphasis on stringed instruments, now might be a great time to check out some of the many classical pieces of music written for strings.  A great place to start is Dvorak’s American Quartet, written while he was he was summering in Stillwell, Iowa, in the Czech community there.  And you have some classical vocal music as well such as The Comic Duet of Two Cats by Rossini, and Summer is a’Cumin In, the first round ever to have been written down.

So, enjoy your CD’s and listen often.  The more familiar your child is with the music, the faster they learn a new activity in class. And the more they learn, the sooner they are ready for extensions to those activities.

-posted by Miss Allison, who thinks that dessert is the best part of dinner!