Piano for Visual Learners

I mentioned some time ago about my plans to increase LM’s music exposure and to, perhaps, start introducing her to the idea of playing a musical instrument. The benefits of listening to music are well-known and unquestionable, but playing music goes as far as “fine-tuning” the brain’s auditory system and has a profound impact on speech and language, memory and attention, and even emotional development.

Playing the piano offers further benefits as it involves playing with both hands  and is, therefore, a great coordination and fine motor skill exercise, working the corpus callosum in your brain – yet another important focus area in our homeschool. Since I received some piano training in my (very distant!) past, I feel I would be more comfortable to help LM with this instrument.

A couple of months ago I tried Music for Little Mozarts, as I wrote here, but, unfortunately, LM did not share my excitement about the programme and we did not progress very far with it. It did not offer enough visual stimuli to LM, the Beethoven Bear and Mozart Mouse storyline did not inspire her to explore the black and white keys and was simply beyond her level of comrehension. This is why, at that point, I decided to leave teaching her to play the piano aside till, perhaps, she was ready one day.

My hopes rekindled when I learned about two software programmes, which looked like they could provide the missing visual support to learning the piano.  The two programmes in question are Piano Wizard and Soft Mozart and they both offer a game-like approach to learning to play the piano (keyboard) and, ultimately, to read sheet music. They both claim to be suitable for young children and older learners with a variety of aptitudes, and have excellent reviews. This could be a way round her current auditory comrehension difficulties!

Having raised some sponsorship from LM’s grandparents and procured a more decent keyboard, I have found myself at crossroads, as I can’t make up my mind as to which one to go for! Neither of the programmes comes cheap, and with money being a HUGE issue for our family, I have to be careful with my investment.

While the two programmes seem to be very similar at first glance, you will find some essential differences once you look at them more carefully. The creators of both programmes Chris Salter (Piano Wizard) and Hellene Hiner (Soft Mozart) have been great contributors to BrillKids forum and they have had a few very heated discussions regarding a variety of subjects pertaining to musical education. If you would like to learn more about these programmes, I recommend reading through those discussions (trying to remain impartial to the contributors' communication styles!).

I will continue researching these two methods and will write up my thoughts. In the meantime, if you have had experience with any of these programmes or are simply willing to share your views, I will greatly appreciate your input!

What a Feeling!

What a fantastic feeling to open my dashboard and see another follower! Thank you for joining me, Tracy, and thank you for educating me about VACTERL. I have to admit, to my great shame, I knew very little about it.

You are doing a great job at your homeschool and I loved your new video of Maggie reading!

Activities to Encourage Speech and Language Development For Younger Children

I wrote some time ago about my DIY plans regarding LM’s speech and language, and described the activities we currently do to improve her listening. I thought I would also step back and review the activities we had done in the past hoping these may be of help to some visitors of my blog.

When LM was initially referred to have her speech and language assessed by a therapist a couple of years ago, she could only say a handful of short words. I was given a list of recommendations targeting her vocabulary, understanding and use of language. Some of the suggestions were quite common sense while some were something I hadn't really thought of before. I suppose that these activities would be relevant for preverbal children or those at a single-word level in terms of their language. In fact, some of these activities can be started from birth as a preventative measure to help the child hit the language milestones on time.

5-Minute Play

One of the most important activities I was recommended by the speech and language therapist was to introduce short 5-minute play sessions throughout the day – as often as I could. The following are the list of rules I was to stick to.

1.    Remove all pressure to talk – DON’T ask your child to repeat what you say and DON’T ask questions (you know the answers to!).

2.    Sit at the same level as the child so that they can see your face – lying on the sofa while your baby is playing on the carpet won’t do; reduce any background noise.

3.    Follow your child’s lead and copy their play in silence – if your child starts banging toys, do exactly the same. This is intended to attract your child’s attention.

4.    Wait for your child to make an eye contact with you:

a.    If they look at you but don’t say anything, smile and say a word for what they have in their hand or say a word for the action they are carrying out;

b.    If they make a noise, but not a specific word, try to guess what they are saying, praise them with a nod, a smile, and model the word you think they are trying to say;

c.    If they say a word and it’s close but not quite right, do not correct (saying, "oh no, it is wrong!"), but again praise them and model  the word you think they are trying to say clearly, e.g. if they say “gog”, you reply “mmm, dog!”

d.    If they say a word and it is clear, repeat the word and add on another, for example, “baby” – “mmm, baby’s sleeping!”

Running Commentary

Outside the five-minute play sessions, during bath times, feeding times and when outside, provide simple 1-2 word commentary. For example, you could get down to your child’s level during their bath time and use words like “splash, splash”, “soap”, “duck”, “quack, quack”, etc.

Copying All Vocalisations, Words and Sounds

Never leave your child’s vocalisations unnoticed. This will give your child good feedback and will encourage them to copy your sounds and words. Add simple sounds to everything, such as “brum-brum”, when playing with a car, etc.

Pretend Play

I was also advised to encourage LM’s pretend play skills by modelling simple play sequences. Show your child how you bath, brush, feed and dress a doll or a teddy. You can do it during play times as well as bath times and mealtimes.

Body Part Awareness

You can work on body part awareness during mealtimes, bath times and play times. For example, during bath times get to your child’s level so they can see your face and introduce each body part by emphasising the word while doing the action, e.g. “Let’ put soap on your head.”

Offering Choices

When offering something, don’t just give a single object, but provide a choice and encourage your child to make their choice by looking, pointing, reaching, gesturing or vocalising. When the child makes a choice, give it to them while saying the name of it. For instance, during a snack time you may want to offer them an apple or banana; if they choose the banana, you give it to them saying “banana”.

Singing and Sign Language

Encourage your child to add sounds, words, and actions to nursery songs, such as “The “Wheels on the Bus”, “Old McDonald”, etc. Introduce the animal sounds with simple signs. Put toy animals in a bag and bring them out one by one making the sound and the sign for each. Encourage your child to add sounds, words and actions. (Sign language is a brilliant tool to enhance language, but this could be a whole new topic, so I will not dwell on it here.)

Looking through Books

Introduce name of animals, food, etc. in simple stories, such as “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”, “Dear Zoo”. You can combine this activity with the previous one. For example, you can get a bag with the animals featured in “Dear Zoo” and use them as props while you read the book and let you child hold the toys.

Encouraging Eye Contact

This used to be LM’s weakest area and I was advised to encourage her to look at my face with simple things like playing “peek-a-boo” and making faces and sounds while sitting at her level. One of the great activities which helped was blowing bubbles and saying “ready, steady, go!” while holding the bubble stick near my face. I gradually increased the time she had to wait looking at me before I blew the bubbles.

I will update this post if I remember more activities.

LM’s Mum

Extension of Mandala Activity – Colouring within Lines

Colouring has never been LM’s favourite activity. No number of new crayons, pens, pencils and markers or colouring books with her favourite characters could make this idea attractive to her. In the end, it was strong reinforcement, moving from very small basic pictures towards more complicated drawings with multiple sections and ensuring that she is successful at each step which got her to accept colouring as not such a bad idea after all.

Although her technique has greatly improved, she still struggles to stay within the lines. One way to progress in this area is to start with basic line drawings with smaller colouring areas and thicker outlines and gradually increase the colouring areas and fade the thickness of the outlines. Depending on your child’s level of skill you may start with colouring areas as small as one square inch and lines as thick as one inch to ensure that the child is successful at each step.

I have described here the Mandala activity I am starting with LM. Although the original right-brain method does not require colouring the patterns, I thought I might as well let her colour them in at the end of the exercise and also double this as a “Colouring within the Lines” activity. So my plan is to widen the outlines with a thick marker (to save ink) and then gradually narrow these down to see if that will help her improve this motor skill.

Mandala Activity

I would like to begin this post by thanking Shen-Li for becoming my follower! I have to say I am honoured and thrilled that such a seasoned blogger in the field of early childhood development has found my novice journal worth visiting again.  I have been stalking Babylicious, one of Shen-Li’s own blogs, and I have to say it is my absolute favourite! This blog is well-known among supporters of early education and needs no promotion, but if for any reason you have not seen it yet and you would like to learn more about the most current ideas regarding parenting, do subscribe to it!

Shen-Li writes a lot about right-brain education, which is a fairly recent movement in early education and which has been attracting devotees all over the world. The information published on her blog is not easily available anywhere so you can be sure to learn something you have never heard of before.

Inspired by one of Shen-Li’s posts, I have come up with the idea of creating this versatile mandala activity.

I cut out a few different shapes out of cheap thin felt, which can be laid on top of one another on a white felt board (you can find the instructions on how to make a felt/flannel board here) to create numerous mandala patterns. I have started with very basic patterns for now but, depending on how well LM does with these, I might move her onto something a bit more complex.

This could make an activity as it is and you can let your very young child experiment by making his/her own patterns while practicing colour and shape names. However, if you would like to use it as a right-brain activity and strengthen your child’s photographic memory, then draw the black and white outlines of your patterns on paper, follow Shen-Li’s instructions and reuse these pieces time and again to create new combinations.

I have drawn a dozen easy mandala outlines containing basic shapes, which could be a place to start if your child, like mine, is completely new to this kind of activity. Feel free to download these here and use them as a size guide when cutting out felt shapes.

Bye for now!

Art Matching

Matching is a fun activity which reinforces visual discrimination and concentration and which is an important prerequisite skill for reading and writing. We started this activity with LM long time ago and have progressed from simple picture-to-picture matching to matching shapes, letters, numbers, words, words to pictures, numbers to quantities, matching emotions, etc.

I ended up with so many sheets that I created a “Matching Book” which is, quite basically, an A4 folder where I would “mix and match” different sheets and which I would offer to LM as an activity to complete independently to keep her busy for a few precious minutes.

I recently added a few more picture-to-picture sheets which are, in fact, reproductions of famous masterpieces.

The idea came after I had bought this colouring book, which, to my disappointment, did not have any colour reproductions of the paintings. As I needed to procure full colour versions of the masterpieces for LM’s reference, I decided to double this as a matching activity.

These sheets will probably deserve a separate folder as I am planning to extend this activity in the future by turning this into title-to-painting and artist-to-painting matching activity. Another thought would be to take this idea and to create a few “I spy” tasks to find some details in the picture, but this, for now, is only at the “planning stage”.