Kindermusik anYour Child: Fast or Slow?

Kindermusik and Your Child: Fast or Slow?


Posted on February 2, 2012 by Jamie.Sterling

Have you ever asked your child to move faster, slow down, walk, run, or hurry up? By doing so, you are giving your child experience with tempo. Just as music has tempo (or speed), we experience tempo in just about everything we do. We play a lot with tempo in our Kindermusik classroom, not only because tiptoeing, running, walking, crawling, and creeping are fun, but also because it helps young children feel varying tempi through movement, long before they can express an understanding of tempo verbally.

Music has a variety of terms to describe tempo, or the speed of the music…accelerando (going faster), presto (very fast), adagio (quite slow), moderato (moderate). Your Our Time toddler music class student won’t be learning these terms per se; however he will be experiencing them in every class! Because our little ones are instinctively interested in fast and slow (mostly fast!), Kindermusik capitalizes on that interest and provides a multi-sensory experience that looks something like this: The child moves himself both fast and slow to the music, sees others moving fast and slow, hears music that is both fast and slow, and has opportunity to experience playing an instrument both fast and slow. In other words, he is fully engaged.

Your child will do many activities in the years to come that involve tempo. Did you know there is a tempo to running, swinging a golf club, a tennis racket, a baseball bat? There is a tempo in moving up and down the basketball court, the soccer field, the football field. There is tempo to speech, and of course, music. Your child’s Kindermusik classroom experiences with tempo translate later into valuable skills that cross into every area of your child’s life – music, sports, dance, gymnastics, art, drama, and more!

Mommy, baby, toddler, dancing, singing, smiling.

This is what it's all about!

Bringing Learning Home

Spotlight on Learning: Repetition

Think about the last time you tried doing something for the first time. Maybe it was using your new smart phone, going for the perfect cloth diaper fold, or even figuring out how to feed your baby while checking Facebook at the same time. (Hey, we all need some outside connections!) After lots of repetition, you'll probably master the fine art of that new thing, or at least fumble a little less.

For your child, few things build her brain and open opportuniites for learning more than consistent repetition of healthy activities and experiences. Every new activity in which she participates makes a new neural pathway in her brain. Each time that experience is repeated, the neural pathway is strengthened. That's why in Kindermusik class we deliberately repeat activities from week to week and give you the tools to repeat them at home, too.

Everyday connection: Practice makes perfect learning. Listen to the music from class and do the activities together at home. Repeat. Listen to the music from class and do the activities together at home. Repeat. (Learning is that easy ... and fun!)

Help Your Child Build Spatial-Reasoning Skills

     Did you know that children participating in Kindermusik tripled spatial-reasoning skills, essential for future success in math, science, and geography? (see image at bottom of this document)
     Be a Sound Explorer. Give your child the chime ball, set of play keys, and a book. Let her explore the different ways those items make sounds, separately and together.