We’ve had such a wonderful summer with all your beautiful families! We’re on hiatus to give us all a breather and some time to refresh ourselves before the Fall, as it will be back-to-school for so many of you with older kids.
We hope this time will be restful and joyful for you. If you are looking for a way to keep the musical experiences going in between Kindermusik sessions, don’t forget all the tools your educator has given you this year!
Did you even realize that your educator has given you tools to help you in your caretaking role? Music class is a joyful and enriching musical experience for your child, it is true. But our Little Learner classes are also chock-full of child development education for the adults too!
Our educators are child development experts. They not only have years of experience and training, but our JOY Team also engages in ongoing professional development to make sure we keep our skills sharp and learn the newest evidence-based best practices for teaching and raising children. We implement those practices in our classes, and in so doing model them for you.
From substituting “Good job!” for “You did it!”, to S.T.A.R. breathing, there are so many moments of a Kindermusik class that you can integrate into your routines at home. Try engaging your child’s mirror neurons with deep breathing and some musical cuddle time before tucking them into bed. Use an I Love You Ritual before a diaper change to set the connection and calm your child. Sing “toys away!” between activities to remind them to clean up at home as well and prepare them for transitions in their day.
And of course if you need a little extra fun during an unscheduled day, you can always tap into your Kindermusik @home activities for inspiration. There are fun craft activities, video field trips, dance-along music, and more. There are a lot of often untapped resources available to you with your Kindermusik enrollment.
As always, together or (briefly) apart, you are always in our heart. We wish you well and will sing with you soon!
We are in full Summermusik swing, and it is pure magic!
We are proud of how our wonderful educators create magic each week in class. They work hard every week to perfect their lessons and to bring the most joyful learning activities to your children. They are so fun and filled with delight your children don’t even realize they are learning and building skills!
And while our educators bring the magic, it wouldn’t be complete without YOU. It is your commitment to bringing your children to their music class that makes our studio tick. As you invest in this experience for them, it will pay dividents for well beyond the time you spend in class. We are in the business of building better brains, and your child will benefit from that for their entire lifespan.
Experts have found that the most “bang for your buck” when it comes to the benefits of music and its affects on the brain occurs between the ages of 0-7. Yes, that’s right. From birth until 7 years old is the time the brain can get the most benefit from musical study. And that benefit can be measured later in life as they can excel in school, learn to solve increasingly complex problems, work collaboratively in their adult life, and even as their risk of dementia decreases in later life. Isn’t that incredible?
While musical study gives the most brain benefits when experienced early in life, those benefits are available at any time, to any person, at any age. It is never too late to study music or learn an instrument. So if you are concerned about your own brain, pick up your old school instrument. If you are worried about your aging parents, encourage them to join a community choir and stave off the effects of cognitive decline.
Caretakers of young children are pulled in a million directions. There are so many demands on your time that you have to really understand the value of music classes in order to invest the time and money into them. Our objective is to communicate those benefits and that value to you during our classes, through this blog, and in our weekly newsletter. There are so many resources available there to support you in your parenting journey.
So keep on coming back so we can keep giving you more! More music, more laughter, more joy, more learning, more development, and more benefits. Isn’t music just like magic?
Our summer camps for our Little Music Makers are wrapping up this week and we have had a BLAST. Your kids have been pirates and adventurers, drummers, pianists, and more. Seeing the older children develop their musical skills through these camps is always a pleasure.
Our Little Learner classes are also winding down soon, and so many of your children are STEPPING UP in September. Our ongoing enrollment is the BEST way to ensure your child continues to get the best in child development classes. Just think how much they’ve learned in the last year! They’ve grown socially, physically, cognitively, linguistically, emotionally, and musically.
Our classes are music classes, yes, but they are so much more than that. We use music as the perfect tool to light up all areas of the brain and support all areas of development. Kindermusik fosters the perfect environment for your child to explore, try new things, experiment, observe, and learn. Your children learn from this environment and the other children as much as they do from the educator.
Hopefully you adults learn from your educator as well! They are not just there for your kids, but are there for YOU. Our JOY Team has been thoroughly trained in Conscious Discipline and child development and they have so many tips and tricks up their sleeves. Hopefully through their modeling you’ve picked up on ways to manage, teach, and support your children at home. From I Love You Rituals to S.T.A.R. breathing we model these techniques for you throughout the year.
And when you find yourself missing Kindermusik during the month of August, come back here to our blog and you’ll find some fun ideas for how to keep the musical fun alive at home.
Close your eyes and visualize. What comes to mind when you think of the sounds of summer?
Some possibilities might include:
Sprinklers running
Lawn mowers rumbling
Children playing
Pool water splashing
Birds chirping
Ice clinking
Ice cream truck music tinkling
Certainly you could add many more to the list. Each of those suggestions instantly brings an auditory memory to your brain, doesn’t it?
When moving around your life and days you may hear these sounds without even realizing that you’re hearing them. Unless you train your attention, you may not even notice them at all. But when you engage in active listening then you hear a whole host of things.
Active listening is an important skill, one that we seek to develop in every Kindermusik class. It’s not just listening. It’s listening. Children spend so much time making the noise they don’t often sit down to understand the sounds around them. And so we practice.
We rub our ears from top to bottom to stimulate the auditory nerve and its neural pathways. We say “Listen, listen, listen, shh” as a way of cueing our children’s brains to pay attention and hold still. We play a mystery sound and ask them what it was. We mimic the sound. We repeat the sound and listen again.
This skill can help children in their social development, cognitive development, and more. The ability to perceive, process, and comprehend the sounds around us is a key ability that hearing people need to foster. We could all spend a little more time listening, don’t you think?
So this summer, spend a little time listening. By yourself or with your child. In the cool of twilight, sit on your back porch and listen. What do you hear? Help your child identify the sounds of summer. And as you listen yourself, you’ll find a little more calm, a little more peace. Who couldn’t use that?
Popsicles. Running through the sprinklers. Night games. Bathing suits and cut off jeans. Corn on the cob and watermelon. These are the most vivid memories for many adults as they reminisce about their childhood summers.
The summers of childhood have changed dramatically in the last generation. More and more children today spend their summers addicted to screens and computer games. Particularly in this era of Covid we rely on technology more than ever. It’s such a double edged sword as we are the first generation of parents raising children in a digitally dominant world. It’s easy to fall into the convenience of technology and forget to connect with nature and get ourselves and our children outdoors.
Now our long summer days are shortening incrementally with every sunset. The oppressive heat is starting to abate ever so slightly. The bad wildfire caused air quality is improving day by day. The back to school supplies hit the stores weeks ago. Our joy-packed Summermusik camps and classes have wrapped up. Many of us have spent our summer rushing from one activity to the next.
And while we may be looking forward to routines and cooler temperatures, we still have a little time to indulge our senses and renew our minds. Perhaps we can eek a bit more summer out of the next couple of weeks.
So go out into your backyard with fresh eyes. Hunt for the nectar gathering bees. Take your little one by the hand and run through the sprinkler. Take your shoes off and let the sensory input of the dirt, sand, and grass ground you.
Our Fall classes will be here before you know it. Reserve your spot if you haven’t yet in one of our two locations (South Jordan reopening for Fall 2021! Yay!) and rest easy in the final days of the season. Find a moment to breathe it all in, and love it all out.
Thank you for spending part of your summer with us. We loved every minute of it. We wish you well.
The school year has wound down. The pleasant days of summer are here. The weather has heated up and the Covid cases are low and we can emerge from our wintery cocoons. It is the perfect time for a special activity we like to call the Listening Walk. But first, an explanation about listening.
In our classes we nearly always include a focused listening activity. The children love this! It’s so fun to “get out our listening ears to listen, listen, listen” and rub our ears to ready for listening. This not only helps focus the children’s brains for listening, but rubbing the ears stimulates nerves that awaken the brain and send out “feel-good” endorphins. We could all use a little more of those happy brain chemicals, so rub rub rub those ears!
We set aside time every week for focused listening because we know how important it is for children to develop the skill of listening. We must help support that development. It aids in their cognitive development, their social and emotional development, and of course their musical development!
We take a simple sound and help your children prepare for listening, going through the physical steps of calming their body, focusing their mind, processing the sound, and then developing a socially and emotionally appropriate response to the sound.
One of the best parts of a focused listening activity is seeing their eyes light up as they try to figure out what the sound is. You can practically see the wheels in their brains turning!
A way to extend this activity is with the previously mentioned “listening walk”. This is particularly effective and fun with preschool aged children and older. You can of course go on a listening walk with your babies and toddlers as well, but it will require more modeling and labeling from the parents.
First, tell your child you’re going on a special walk. Not a normal walk. A listening walk. You’re going to be completely silent as you walk down the street and be detectives. You’re going to see if you can figure out what people, animals, and the environment in your neighborhood are doing simply by being still and listening.
Walk a few steps. Do you hear a lawnmower? Walk a few more steps. Do you hear some birds chirping? Maybe your hear the whirring of a hummingbird’s wings. Walk down the block some more. Do you hear the sound of your own feet hitting the sidewalk? What else can you hear? Do you hear splashing? Does it sound like people swimming in a backyard pool? Or perhaps it’s a dog walking through a puddle left behind by the sprinklers.
This is such a fun way to get your child to wake up their senses and explore the world around them. You’ll enjoy it too!
And just in case you miss storytime with Ms Maren, here’s a perfect story about going on a listening walk. Watch this video with your child and go out on a walk together. What did YOU hear on YOUR walk?
Deep into summer, children thriving through play, free from the strictures of the academic year, full-time caregivers are starting to count down the days to the start of school. Concerns about the inevitable “summer backslide” might be creeping into some parents minds.
Here are a few suggestions to keep the learning going through the summer, without resorting to workbooks or learning apps. Keep the summertime fun going . . . just sneak in some surreptitious brain development.
1. GAME NIGHT
Enjoy a weekly game night as a family. Try games that promote critical thinking skills and strategy. Or perhaps a game that requires letter recognition, or basic mathematics. Card games, Scrabble Jr, Think-it Link-it, Backgammon, Jenga. A little healthy competition between kids and parents can motivate them to think ahead and recognize patterns.
2. CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION
Legos, Lincoln Logs, Magnatiles are all great options. But so are less expensive options such as wooden blocks or even your basic cardboard box. Provide them with paint, glue, scissors, tape, construction paper, popsicle sticks, and even toothpicks. Challenge your child to build a bridge or a tower and see what engineering skills they can develop.
3. MATH PRACTICE
Draw a series of targets in sidewalk chalk on your driveway. In each target write a number. Give your child a bucket of water and a couple of sponges. Have them throw their sponges and whatever numbers they land on can be combined in different equations. Or do the same with hula hoops and bean bags. Or put numbered targets on the wall and get out a nerf gun.
Perhaps you could go treasure hunting on the beach. Count up all the seashells you find and add them to how many your child found. Who found more and by how much? Real-life story problem solving right there.
4. LIBRARY TREASURE HUNT
Weekly visits to the library are one of the best ways to spend the summer. See if your child can find a book on dinosaurs, or dogs, or pirates, or whatever their current interests are. Or find a book with a certain letter in the title. Or a book of a certain color. Check out at least one new book each week. Sign them up for their very own library card and let them learn the responsibility of checking out and returning on time.
5. STAY ACTIVE
Active bodies mean active brains. The hottest days of summer can make us stay indoors, usually in front of a screen. You can beat the heat and stay active by hitting the pool, running through the sprinklers, or hiking in the mountains. Staying indoors is sometimes necessary, so throw on a Cosmic Kids Yoga video and let your kids move their bodies through a variety of poses as they get immersed in the storytelling. Or take them to an indoor jumping center or rock climbing wall. Air conditioning and physical exertion! Win-win.
Don’t forget that you are your child’s partner. Immerse yourself in these activities with them. Keep the connection alive. They’ll be back in school before you know it.
Summertime: when the livin’ is easy . . . except when it’s not.
Holiday celebrations, hosting barbeques and picnics, finding child care, taking kids to their various enrichment activities, swimming lessons, road trips, family reunions, and more. What a wonderful time of year! But with all that joy and all those fun activities we can get stressed from all the running around. Our children can be over-stimulated and under-rested. And over stimulation and sleep deprivation can lead to behavioral and developmental problems.
Summer has changed a lot in a generation. In the 80s the days were filled with running around the neighborhood in bathing suits and cut-off shorts, chasing the distant jingle of the ice-cream truck, dashing through sprinklers, and playing pick-up games of Kick the Can. And don’t forget laying out in the backyard with tanning oil slathered all over you. Some things have changed for the better (thank you sunscreen!) but other things seem a bit . . . much.
With all the wonderful opportunities and activities and year-round schools that we have now, there is one thing oftentimes missing from our children’s lives: BOREDOM.
Did you know that some child psycholgists say that boredom is good for our children?
Yes, it’s true. Boredom is actually a benefit, and not something to be avoided.
Boredom has been proven to promote creativity, problem-solving, and independence. Boredom may be just the stimulus that your children need this summer. Yes, all those enriching camps and lessons are wonderful. And yes, those sanity-saving screens are convenient and easy to hand to our children when we need a few minutes to ourselves.
However, if we schedule every minute of the day and fill the leisure minutes with mind-numbing online content, we are doing our children a disservice. They need to be bored in order to have the time to tinker, time to think, and time to explore. Boredom helps them learn self-regulation. It provides them opportunities for conflict resolution (sibling rivalry anyone?). It gives them a chance to be in charge of themselves and flex those developing independence muscles.
It is HARD at first to shed the assumption that we need to be full-time entertainment directors for our kids. And if we don’t provide the fun and refuse to hand over a screen, that’s even harder. At first. But if you can cope with the complaining and bickering for a few minutes, it won’t take long before you’ll see your kiddos find something to make or break or solve or climb.
So lean in to the summertime blues. Let your kids be bored. It’s good for them. It’s good for you.
“Aaah, summer – that long anticipated stretch of lazy, lingering days, free of responsibility and rife with possibility. It’s a time to hunt for insects, master handstands, practice swimming strokes, conquer trees, explore nooks and crannies, and make new friends.”
~Darell Hammond
The old-time melody “Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer” evokes images of small town festivals, parades, popsicles, watermelon, and corn on the cob. It reminds us of our childhoods spent running through sprinklers and playing night games with the neighbor kids.
The summers of childhood have changed dramatically in the last generation. More and more children today spend their summers addicted to screens and computer games. We find ourselves over-scheduled with work, finding child care alternatives, summer camps, vacations, reunions, festivals, barbecues, and more. It’s easy to let the extra activities of summer overwhelm us and make us yearn for the predictable schedule of the school year. Some schools are already back in session!
Now our long summer days are shortening incrementally with every sunset. The oppressive heat is starting to abate ever so slightly. The back to school supplies hit the stores weeks ago. Our joy-packed Summermusik camps and classes have wrapped up. Many of us have spent our summer rushing from one activity to the next.
And while we may be looking forward to routines and cooler temperatures, we still have a little time to indulge our senses and renew our minds. Perhaps we can channel Mr. Nat King Cole’s memorable lyrics and eek a bit more summer out of the next couple of weeks.
So go out into your backyard with fresh eyes. Hunt for the nectar gathering bees. Take your little one by the hand and run through the sprinkler. Take your shoes off and let the sensory input of the dirt, sand, and grass ground you.
Our Fall classes will be here before you know it. Reserve your spot (in one of our TWO locations) and rest easy in the final days of the season. Find a moment to breathe it all in, and love it all out.
Thank you for spending part of your summer with us. We loved every minute of it.
This summer, the Salt Lake Library’s reading program is titled “Dig Into Reading.” What a great and affordable way to spend time with the kids. You can find their calendar online here.
One thing I like to do is plan other simple activities (like reading specific books or making a special meal) around outings. The concept was born during my perfectionism-as-a-mom state, but I have carried it through because I’ve really enjoyed the memories we make as a family. I’ve just gotten better at simplifying — when I was hard on myself, nobody was having any fun.
So here are a few ideas based on some of our most successful family activities if you want to augment some of the city library calendar events.
Watch Beekeepers: make a delicious honey-based dessert (this simplified baklava recipe looks promising); find some online coloring pages that are honey and bee related; have a spelling bee.
Riverside Garden Storytime: Go on a hike; check out the butterfly exhibit at the Hogle Zoo (the ones that are pinned to the board – in the small animal building); spend some time weeding your garden (hah!) or maybe just plan a seedling; visit some public gardens (Temple Square is free, but Red Butte Garden is always a delightful place to visit, too!)
Don’t forget you can do the same for our Kindermusik studio summer programs! In face, one of the favorite themes ever I build around our Kindermusik Summer Camp. Check back next time for some ways to splash in the water, spend a busy day, sing with the opera, enjoy the music of Latin America or pretend to be royalty!
Do any of these spark your own ideas? Please share!
