These ideas in the Games for Babies Series can be played with babies 9 months and up, but my children play these well into their preschool years.

Croquet

What you’ll need:
Ping pong balls
Wooden spoons

In its simplest form, you use the wooden spoons to play a “free-form” version of croquet all around the living room. With little ones, it takes a lot of hand-eye coordination just to hit the ball!

You can also sit facing your child (with legs spread to contain runaway balls), and hit the ping pong ball back and forth between you.

As your child gets older, create a little “wicket” course with blocks or books or boxes. Have fun with it!

Chicken Ball

What you’ll need:
Feather dusters
Balloons

I have to give credit for the invention of this game to my nephew, Jared. Blow up a balloon (or two), and hit the balloon with the feather duster. Sound silly? It is. But unbelievably fun.

For older ones, place a making tape line on the floor and play with the classic rule, “Don’t let the balloon touch down on your own side”.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, whose own children and their cousins launched rocket balloons over the loft balcony attempting to land them in the growup’s coffee cups this weekend at Grandma and Poppa’s beach house. (Another fun game, but not for babies!)

The word “discrimination” tends to get a bad rap. It’s actually a very important skill. Especially when it comes to your sense of hearing. For instance, I don’t want to open my front door, call my children by name in to dinner, and have all the neighborhood kids appear. (Well, that might be a compliment to my culinary skills, but that’s not the point.)

Here are some fun and easy activities for you do with your child to help develop auditory discrimination:

Infants (newborn to around 18 months):
You’ll do most of the work at this age. Point out the noises around you. Sounds have to be alone, rather than layered or mixed in with others. When more than one sound occurs simultaneously, infants cannot discriminate between them, even if they are very different noises.

• Say, “Listen. That is a dog barking.” Then, you imitate the dog. “Woof. Woof. A dog says, ‘woof, woof’”. Eventually, your baby will hear a dog barking and say, “Dog.”
• Ask and answer your own question. “What sound does a truck make? A truck goes ‘vroom, vroom.’” One day in the future when your little one is playing with a truck, you’ll hear “vroom, vroom”, emanating from her mouth.

In this stage, your baby is learning to associate a particular sound with a particular object. Later, he’ll use this skill to match a sound to a letter symbol.

Note: When you speak in full sentences to your baby, you’ll be demonstrating vocabulary, good grammar, and correct sentence structure. What you put in her mind will, at some point, come out naturally!

Toddlers (18 months to 3 years):
As toddlers, children continue to discriminate single sounds best. You’ll still need to name new sounds, but now they will readily imitate them back to you. Toddlers are also likely to ask what an unidentified sound is.

• You can ask questions like, “What is making that sound?” (a cow) “Can you moo like a cow?” “What does a ­­­­­­­­­­­­_______ say?”
• Toddlers can now associate sound with a process or event. “What’s that sound? … Yes, someone is knocking on the door. What does that mean?”… You are right. Grandma is here!” Also, think microwave beeping, clothes drying timer sounding, keys rattling in the lock, phone ringing.

Save the learning of letter sounds for later. And letter names have nothing to do with reading. Auditory discrimination is the best first step towards reading readiness.

Preschoolers (3 to 6 years):
At 3 and 4, preschoolers are now ready for simple layered sounds. That is, identifying a sound (like a lawnmower, and then hearing a bus drive past), and being able to recognize the sound of the bus while the lawnmower is still making noise.

• Focus now on picking out sounds. Make a game of it. Let’s say you are taking a trip to the beach. What are the things that you, the grownup can hear? Birds, waves, people talking, laughing, a ferry boat… Have your child identify a sound. He picks laughing. You listen for it, too. Now you say, “Can you also hear the waves?” He has to use his filters – turn off his ears to laughing, and listen for the waves. That is auditory discrimination.
• For 4 ½ and up, I love the Kindermusik CD called Ned Redd, World Traveler. Every song on the CD is from a different country, and the narrator at the beginning of each track will give you a choice of three different sounds to listen for, and how many times each sound occurs. There are three different “levels”, so younger and older kids (and their grownups!) can play together.

Here’s a track from Ned Redd so you can play this game right now.

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If you’d like to download the whole album (great for a car trip!), you can right here on play.kindermusik.com.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who developed her auditory discrimination skills by practicing band music on her euphonium in the woods at music camp right next to her violin-playing friend Gwen, while blocking out Gwen rehearsing orchestra music. I am told that it sounded rather horrible to the non-discriminating!

I am a commentator for BamRadio Network, the largest education radio network in the world. I recently participated in an interesting discussion on children and conflict.

Conflict occurs because we are all different. It’s true for both children and adults. Think about it. I think we should leave on our road trip at 8:00am, and my husband Karl says we should leave at 6:00am. My experience tells me the kids will be cranky (me, too!) if we have to wake them up to go. Karl’s point of view says that not getting caught in rush hour traffic is vital. We have different perspectives, and that creates conflict.

The same thing is true for children. Their outlook on the world is even smaller, and more ego-centric than grownups, which make them more likely to outright fight.

It is NOT your job to keep everything peaceful, and everybody happy. You can’t. However, it is your job to allow those episodes of conflict to become skill-building moments in the area of problem solving.

Here’s how:
There are phrases we all use (they often come from our own childhood) that are ineffective with children, and don’t help them solve the problem. Be nice. You need to say you are sorry. Let’s all share. You should play with Kimmy. (Sound familiar?) As much as you want to make your child say they are sorry (and yes, apologizing is important), you can’t force them to do so, anymore than you can compel them to play with a particular child. So, recognize your phrases and where they came from!

Children are concrete and specific, so we need to be, too. Don’t ask the why questions like “Why did you hit him?” That is abstract, and not how children think. You aren’t going to get an answer. Instead, ask what questions: “What is the problem?” Mark will tell you, “I want the boat”. Mark doesn’t know how to get the boat, so he uses what he knows will work – he’ll just reach over and grab it.

Now that you know what the problem is, you’ll need to validate and help them name feelings. Sometimes the very little ones (toddlers) don’t have the words, so you can help. But only if they need it! “Maddy, are you mad at Mark for taking your boat?” “I see that you are sad.” Sometimes your children’s feelings may not seem logical to you, but they are very real and logical to them! Allow them space to be mad, frustrated or to cry.

Once the children are calm (And this is important, because problem solving cannot happen when emotions are running wild. Think about it – do you find good solutions when you are hopping mad? I don’t.), then you can ask more “what” questions. What are your ideas to solve this problem? Children are remarkably brilliant at coming up with solutions. It may take a few minutes, so give them the space and time they need to figure it out.

Don’t solve the problem for them. Encourage them to devise their own solutions. Don’t offer suggestions to preschoolers. Their solution may not be the same as one you would have come up with, but that’s okay.

Toddlers may need some more questions to help them explain their behavior. Did you want the boat because it is red? (Remember not to ask why!) What if Maddy and you and I went and looked for another red boat you can play with? The toddlers Mark and Maddy may not like your first idea, but you are modeling the process of conflict resolution. So try again.

Once they’ve come up with an idea, they are much more likely to own it and stick to the solution.

On a side note, I will tell you that as my children get older, I don’t step into the middle of their conflicts very often. Many times they will resolve the problem better without my help. And I don’t have to be stuck in the middle.

In the end, conflict resolution is a foundational skill that enables our children to become confident, successful at school and work, and competent at negotiation and cooperation.

You can listen to this podcast in its entirety here.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who reports that we ended up leaving on our road trip somewhere around 9:30am, and encountered neither traffic nor cranky children.

Now there’s a bit of information I’ll bet you never knew!

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who is of the opinion that a well-developed embouchure can make you a better kisser!! : )

A trombone player.

Clarinet players.

I’m a commentator for BamRadio network, and was prepping for a recent podcast about music funding in the schools. I have a good friend and roommate from college who has been a music teacher for nearly 20 years, as well as the Music Coordinator for the entire school distract. I decided to ask her a question.

Being delightfully as opinionated about music as Pam is, (and in the trenches every day), I knew I would get a great answer. What I didn’t expect was the emotions and memories of my own school music experience that her answer would trigger.

My Question: What is the impact on students when we take music out of schools?

Her answer:
This has been really good for me to reflect at this time of year when work gets pretty challenging and I’m tempted to count the minutes until the last day of school.

In my opinion, the number one impact is that there is a large group of students who lose out on experiencing a sense of belonging and purpose, (especially in middle and high school when that is so important).

For me and so many others I know, music is what gave us some kind of identity – we weren’t jocks or cheerleaders or druggies or theatre people, we didn’t have some ethnic group, or belong to the FFA – we were band or choir geeks and we knew that we belonged to something bigger than ourselves.

The 40 – 100 (or however big your band, orchestra or choir was) other kids were our cronies, our peeps, our brothers and sisters; they had our backs. We got out of our music groups what many kids are looking for when they join gangs – a sense of family and belonging.

I have seen kids who were “social misfits” blossom and become leaders through being successful in music and earning the respect of other students because of their success. I have seen shy, quiet girls become confident and vivacious because of the admiration they receive for their musical talent. I have seen awkward boys become self-assured young men because of their performance experiences. I am so proud of my students – watching them grow from kindergarten through high school.

Again, at least for me, the other great impact is applying hard work to achieve excellence, to work toward perfection – not just being good at something – being better than we ever dreamed we could be, and having that moment when it all comes together and touches your soul.

I have always been a good student – A’s in school, high honor roll, cum laude, etc., but music is the only academic area where moments of high achievement have touched my soul. No term paper or science lab ever did that. As a working adult, I apply those high standards to everything I do.

When we take music away, we take those moments away.

-posted by Miss Analiisa, whose realizes that her happiest memories of school center around music, whether it be singing “Don Gato” in third grade, being picked for “the solo” in 6^th grade band (and totally flubbing it at the concert, but my band mates cheered me on anyway), or playing in a group of 400 other musicians in all-state band and feeling part of something magical.

Today is National Tap Dancing Day. It was created in honor of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a significant contributor to this unique American art form. Tap dancing came about through the fusion of African tribal dances and Scottish, Irish, and English clog dances, hornpipes, and jigs.

Here’s a fun video of one of the greats, Gene Kelly, singing and playing a “tapping game” with Julie Andrews. Enjoy!

-posted by Miss Analiisa, who is amazed how Gene Kelly makes tap dancing look so effortless!