Kindermusik is NOT intended to be just 45 minutes of fun once a week (though it is fun!) Kindermusik is all about what happens at home, as well as in class. In order to assist you, the parents and caregivers of the children enrolled, Kindermusik International provides you with the tools you need to continue the classroom experience at home.
Your primary resource is your Home Activity Book. I can already see you experienced Kindermusik grown-ups shaking your heads and saying, “Oh, no our CD is the primary resource for play at home.” But I really mean it – the Activity Book is the base for turning your 45 minutes of class fun into a week-long foray into the world of learning through music.
Without the book, you can only re-create what we have done in class. The book provides you with tools and ideas for extending what we have done in class, and adapting the activities to suit your child at home.
So… pull out your Home Activity Book, and turn to page 4. At the bottom, you’ll find a little graph that has 6 icons. Kindermusik has taken the six areas of brain development – physical, cognitive, emotional, language, social and emotional – and given each one an icon so you can quickly identify them throughout the book.
Throughout the book, you will find little tidbits of information (we call them Foundation of Learning Statements, or FOLS for short), about different areas of development. The FOLS also tell you how the activities you are learning in class, or choosing from the book to do at home meet your child’s developmental needs.
Now, you can’t decide to just stay at home and do Kindermusik, and not come to class! The FOLS you will hear in class are not likely to be in the book, and vice versa. The combination of At Home Materials and class provide the optimum well-rounded experience.
In the book, you will also find all the words the songs, all the notated melody lines, and the words and directions for the finger plays and chants. Please don’t hesitate to make up your own words to the songs. This is an age-old tradition called piggy-backing. Did you know there are over 500 verses for Yankee Doodle, and over 100 of them are about George Washington? So be creative and make up some new verses to the songs. It might just get you in the history books!
The core of the Home Activity Book is the activities. (No surprise there!) There are games, activities and crafts, and extensions of activities we do in class that are intended to be done at home. You’ll also find the American Sign Language for several of the animals in Fiddle Dee Dee.
Some of my favorite activities:
The home-made animal stamps on page 11; you can certainly supplement your animals with other shapes from the cookie cutter drawer as well. What animal doesn’t like to look at a sky full of stars, or a rainbow of hearts?
I also love the creature seekers walk on page 12. To extend this activity at home you can create a scrapbook of the creatures you see on your walk by talking digital photos, printing them, and having your child post them in a book. Ask them about their thoughts on the creature and write them down. Dictating a child’s thoughts is a powerful tool for language development, and when your child is older and more verbally precocious (and taller than you) you will be so glad you preserved their two year old thought about worms on a path in the park. (Trust me… those cute little transcriptions from when they were two have saved my verbally audacious teenagers more than once!!)
You can create a bumblebee garden using the pieces on page 27, and the empty garden on pages 30-31. After you’ve played design master a couple of times by moving the pieces around, let your child choose where things get glued down. And if they want the flowers floating in mid air and the tree root end up and crown side down, so be it. You might just be nurturing the next Picasso.
You can nurture your own inner Picasso by making butterfly sandwiches and serving them at lunch. (page 29) And a hot dog and bun decorated with blobs of ketchup and mustard (or other condiments) in symmetrical patterns is great for the meat eaters in your family.
Actually, anything cylindrical and anything you can arrange symmetrically around it works really well – carrot sticks with dots of hummus or ranch dressing, apple slices with drops of peanut butter, caramel and chocolate sauce, a banana half and piles of blueberries, half a strawberry (one half on each side) and kiwi rounds… the options are endless and beautiful. Art food is a fun way to introduce new foods and concepts to your child- shapes and patterns colors are all easily taught while you are having a beautiful snack together.
You’ll find reading suggestions and listening suggestions throughout the book and things to listen for on your Fiddle Dee Dee CD, too.
I am deliberately skipping the instructions for the Hush Little Baby cards at this point. I love the activities in the book- but before you embark on ANY of them, be sure you scan the Hush Little Baby pictures first, so that you will have the pictures later for the in class activity… the VERY important, life altering activity…. So scan away, and then you can do any of the activities on page 18. Three sets of the cards is best, anyway; one for home, one for the car and one for your purse so that it always gets to class.
So off you go now to the Fiddle Dee Dee box; pull out that book and get some ideas for ways to spend some time playing with your child today. Feed your brain with some of those incredible bits of knowledge found in the book, and we will look forward to playing with you later this week! (Thanks to Studio 3 in Seattle for sharing this blog post with us!)
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