Learning to listen is the key to early literacy…and there is no better, or easier way to learn to listen than through enjoying, exploring and playing music!
The transition from Nursery to Primary 1 is a big deal for young children!
So much has been done in recent years to help ease the move, but in most schools there is still a big change to navigate – the cultural shift from child led, play based learning to an environment with learning outcomes, key stages to reach and more structured goals, as the children learn to read, write and use numbers.
For many children this challenge can continue well into their Primary school experience.
For early literacy, focussed or “active” listening is so important.
How can we learn to encode written symbols for tiny parts of words if we cannot hear the subtle differences between the sounds that make up the words?
Our world today is a very noisy place! It is hard to find a quiet space where we can focus on just listening to one thing.
Bombarded as we all are with multi modal stimulation…TV, Radio, Smartphones, Tablets, Computer games – it is harder than ever for young children to find the time and space to just think about one of their senses …listening.
The first thing we do in our early years music sessions is play “active listening” games. These are games that focus on discriminating the differences between sounds…loud and quiet/ high and low pitch / bumpy and smooth / short and long etc.
We’re turning listening into fun!
They range from comparing different homemade shakers and sorting them into loud and quiet…finding shakers that sound the same…recorded walks to different places where the children have to listen for clues to identify the location…recordings of music where we listen out for different sounds, moods and instruments…and stories where we have to create the sounds as the characters experience them.
We will shortly be sharing these games with you so you can have fun playing them at home.
engagewithmusic 