Inch Worm: Ways to Measure

Recently, at the library, a book about an inch worm caught my eye (Inch by Inch, by Leo Lionni). This cute little picture book is about a cleaver little inch worm who convinces a robin, who is about to eat him for lunch, that he is usefull and can measure the robin. The robin wants his tail measured so he does not eat the worm. After his tail is measured, carries the worm off to measure other birds. One bird at the end makes an unusual request, measure my song. Well the worm feels he can't do that so he finds a cleaver way to escape. 
                                                                 


I thought about this and although it is true you might not be able to measure a song the same way you measure a tail or a beak, you can measure it. I think you could measure it by seeing how many times the worm can move during the song, or by how may seconds long the song is, and I am sure in other ways that I am not thinking of. I decided that this might be a fun measuring experience for my daughter and I to experiment with.

So we read the book and discussed different ways the worm might have approached this problem. We then made an inch worm out of playdoh and started measuring things. We then turned on a song and experiemented with measuring the song with how many times we could move the worm during the duration of the song. We also observed how the song was a particular length of time.

My daughter seems to have enjoy and absorbed both of these measurement methods as she had been going back to them both frequently over the last few days. :) I hope you find this useful and have fun with finding ways to measure a song and other things in your house.

Reading Inch by Inch by Leo Lionni.

Using the playdoh worm to measure the robin's tail.

Time is one measure of a song's length.

Other ways to measure.

Music Friday: Bari Koral Family Rock Band

A little while ago I introduced you to a cd that is meant to help kids learn yoga in a fun way. This week is a continuation of that with a new song that my kids instantly thought was interesting. By the middle of the song my son was already starting to do the moves and by the end of the song my daughter was too.

Yoga has so many great benefits from focus, energy, strength, flexibility, to increasing positive emotions I think it is a great thing to teach kids.

The Bari Koral Family Rock Band has a song called, The Sun Dance. This is basically the Sun Salutation which is a flow of specific "warm up" yoga moves that get your body ready for the other poses (at least that is my understanding you may feel free to correct me if I am wrong).

                                                                      

I would also think about checking this song out on youtube because the video was part of what caught my kids attention and helped them see what movements to do. Once they get the movements down they could probably just listen to the song and know what to do.

Music Friday: The Alphabeticians

There is a great resource in Portland called the PDX kids calendar. You can go to their website and sign up for a weekly newsletter that tells about different events going on that week in Portland (that are kid friendly of course). It is pretty neat.

That is where I heard about The Alphabeticians. They are a Portland band for kids and they are coming out with a new cd on June 2nd. I am giving you links to the previous cd because it is already out and I liked this particular song. They have a sort of rock feel to them with voices and intonation that remind me of The Bare Naked Ladies a bit.

I hope you enjoyed learning about this local kids oriented band.

                                                                  

Music Friday: Dance for the Sun

                                                                     

I recently heard a song off of this album called Let's Go to Work that is sung from the point of view of a child who wants to go to work with their parent. It is a really neat song with a nice calming but upbeat female voice and deep beats from a male voice. I didn't realize until I went searching around for more from the person who wrote it that it was a cd created for doing yoga with children. The neat thing about this album is that it has each set of songs twice, once on their own and a second time with the women talking to a class of kids telling them how to do the yoga.

That part of it would be much neater if it were a video instruction but I still think it is neat if you are a parent who already does some yoga and can help by showing the child while listening to the music.

I personally love yoga but have not been very good about doing it since I had children. While I was in school working on getting my Doctorate in Psychology I was doing yoga about two times a week and I noticed that even with only that much I felt so much better, my arms were very toned, my felt better emotionally after doing the yoga, and slept better at night. Now I still do sun salutations but the rest kind of gets left by the wayside without a formal class. I do notice that it helps me a great deal when I run to stop and do a set of sun salutations if I am out of breath. It makes me focus on my breath and regulate it.

Yoga is not just beneficial for adults but for children and teens also, both of my kids know the sun salutation routine at least in part but this cd is a good reminder that we should start adding this into our daily routine. Now I have a great way to add some child friendly fun to it!

Do you do yoga or meditation? Do you do yoga with your kids or do you think you will?

Music Friday: Emeli Sande

The other day while on the way to a grocery store I was listening to the radio. There happened to be an interview going on with this musician I had never heard of, Emeli Sande. She is apparently a break out artist in the UK right now and I think that soon she will be here too. 
                                           
 
She has an album coming to the US soon but you can download the music now on iTunes or Amazon. 


I thought she was amazing when she sang on the radio and I listened to more of her music on YouTube and have to say that I was really enjoying it. Check her out below.
                                           

What do you think? 

I hope that you have a great weekend and if you have not yet, check out these Easter posts. 
Filling the Easter Basket: Sans Sugar
Homemade Easter Dyes

Music Friday: Bond, No Not James Bond

While listening to my classical station during our lunch time this week I noticed that I suddenly felt an urge to get up and dance. While I enjoy classical music I do have to say that I am usually calmed by it, many times so much so that I have a difficult time staying awake so feeling the urge to dance made me take notice.


I also noticed that this classical music was far from what we usually think of as classical music. The music was very upbeat, had a dance beat, and electric sound. I am not a stranger to electric violin, viola, cello, or bass however, I had not been expecting to hear electric on this particular station.


I ran over and wrote the song and band name down because I thought, hey perfect for Friday music! Without further delay the band is Bond and the song was Allegretto on the album Shine. You can buy it by clicking on the link below:  
                                               

This music is so much fun, perfect for listening to classical when you are not in the mood for calm. Still great for kids and probably will be even better for teens because they will find it really fun too I would bet. It is great to see classical getting a modern makeover even though I do still enjoy the classic version of classical. I think that by giving it this kind of twist younger people are more likely to engage in it and be really interested. 

Take a listen below to clips from the whole album.
                                


I guess that they are fairly well known but I had never heard of them before. Have you heard of them? What is your favorite classical song or musician? 


Happy listening.

Music Friday: Hap Palmer

When we go to the library they always have shakers and bells and do songs where there are a lot of pauses in the music. During that time you are supposed to stop moving and shaking your instruments and then start again when the music starts. 


I don't know why but I love this. My kids enjoy it too so I decided to try and find the song they have at the library. It didn't work out too well. That's okay though because I found some other songs that are just as great! The cd is Rhythms on Parade by Hap Palmer.
                                      
I buy my songs on iTunes since I have an iPod Touch that I can play them on so I actually only purchased one of the songs off of this album at first but then decided to go back and purchase more of them. These songs are perfect dancing songs. They are a little bit country and a little swing. There is a fun one on the cd that talks about different sounds in our world. You could easily point these sounds out later and make observations about other sounds you hear around you. 


These songs help with learning about opposites (talk with your kids about starting and stopping and how these are opposites), rhythm, music, and if you are dancing with them and playing instruments like bells it can help with large motor development. 

Music Saves The Day! Or at Least the Afternoon

Today when we were having a bad moment I turned on the music and I started dancing. Yep that's right, me. I started singing, clapping my hands, and spinning my little girl. She was smiling in no time, my son was quickly joining in and wanted me to dance with him and soon they were lining up to take turns dancing with me while we all sang with the music. The point of this is that I realized that music has some magical powers to it and because it is so important to our life I wanted to share that with you. 

Music in my family has always been important. My Father was the lead singer and guitarist in the band Wooden Music from before I was born until I was in college and my Mom played flute in the same group for many years. I got the chance to sing with my Dad in the band from time to time and played clarinet through high school, even getting the chance to go compete with the high school band in Hawaii in an international contest (which we won, yay). 

These musical roots have made music such an important part of my life and I really hope to give my children a piece of that. I wish that I were as musically talented as my parents and could be playing music around my children all the time but instead I get to try and instill the love of music to them through listening, singing,  and my favorite part, dancing to it. 

Music is such a wonderful thing to have around children. It can help with learning vocabulary, emotions, motor skills (dancing or playing music), learning about similarities and differences, pitch and rhythm, and many reports have suggested that there is an academic boost in many different areas to children who are actively involved in music.  

There are so many great things about music. Here are some ideas for adding music to your day. But first some fun photos of my son dancing :)

Okay adding music to your day...

-Wake up to music. In our family we play background music in the morning. Usually this is something that is quietly playing in the background while I make breakfast and is somewhat calm. 

-Have a daily music time with musical instruments like tambourines, shakers, and recorders. Don't forget dancing! 

-Sing songs frequently. Some we like are:

        *Teeth-brushing song

        *We're on our Way to Grandpa's Farm, a song done by Raffi

        (when we are going somewhere, we change the words to match

        what we are doing)

         *clean up song

         *good night song

         *1 Little 2 Little (with many variations)

         *and we love to make up extremely goofy rhyming songs. 

The  point being we add songs in whenever we can to our day. 

-We add quite music at lunch time/rest time. Usually quietly playing in the background something calming. 

-Adding songs that are useful and help with learning task specific behaviors is a nice way to give your child a behavior que. Examples: This is the way we wash our hands, wash our hands, wash our hands, this is the way we wash our hands, after we use the restroom. Another one is: Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere, clean up clean up everybody do your share. 

-When someone is having a bad moment you can use calm music or fun/funny music to try and help them calm down or change direction emotionally. 

Music is so important to us that I would like to share it with you every Friday, or at least that is my plan. I am going to share with you a song or artist that our family enjoys listening and dancing to. I will probably share "adult" music as well as children's from time to time. So I hope that you will check back to see what new tunes our family likes AND please tell me your favorites too! I plan to file them all on a page titled Music To Dance To.

If I could share Wooden Music with you that is what I would do but since I can't (no mp3s of them) I will share my daughter's favorite song right now which is We Are the Dinosaurs by Laurie Berkner. 

                                         

This is a fun song that we first heard at library story time. We like to march along to the tune and "eat" using the sign language sign for eat. Then we "sleep" in our nest using the sign for sleep. Of course don't forget the roar at the end. I have to warn you this one gets stuck in my head. 

                                       

I would love to hear about how you use music in your day and what some of your favorite children's musicians are.