Here are two great Halloween videos by Mr. Harry. The children are working on following directions in the If You’re a Kid, Halloween remix. In 5 Orange Pumpkins the children are working on pumpkins/fall theme, rhyming/fingerplay skills and subtraction.
The children started playing the the Pick the Pumpkin game on Starfall.com today in school.
Starfall is a wonderfall website that you have to check out with your child. Starfall.com is a free on-line service that helps children learn to read. It includes a lot of ABC animations, animated interactive books and other reading exercises.
The children really enjoyed listening to me read the book
If There’s a Fire is one of the children’s favorite song that we have been singing during our fire safety unit. It has a very good message at the end of the song and that is if there is a fire YOU GET OUT! Also, we have been singing and practicing Stop, Drop and Roll.
Here is the children’s favorite fire safety video. They love to play it over and over. It is full of a lot of very good fire safety imformation that we have been talking about in our classroom.
Kids who grow up hearing music, singing songs, and moving to the beat are enjoying what experts call “a rich sensory environment.” That’s just a fancy way of saying they’re exposed to a wide variety of tastes, smells, textures, colors, and sounds. And researchers believe this forges more pathways between the cells in their brains.
Musical experiences are an important way to help create these pathways, also called neural connections. And while listening to music is certainly key to creating them, it’s when kids actively participate in music that they make the strongest connections.
Research shows that kids who are actively involved in music (who play it or sing it regularly):
http://kidshealth.org/parent/growth/learning/preschool_music.html
After reading that article I think back to this week in our classroom. All the children loved dancing and singing. We all had a lot of fun dancing to this music video. Besides having fun moving and grooving to the music the children were working on following directions.
We have been singing these apple song in our classroom.