Now that we are back into full pre-schooling (thanks to things settling down on the home front), I have decided to start doing “singing time” every day with my kids. I was raised in a music-centered home, and I’ve always wanted to have music in our home, too. We sing all the time anyway, but I felt like playing some music games, learning new songs, etc would be a good way for me to bond with the kids, and help increase their attention span.
Yesterday was our first day of “singing time” – it went well, the kids were super excited about it, but I quickly realized that “singing time” will require more planning than just singing a bunch of songs. Well, at first. Eventually I want to be able to just pull together some songs to sing – but for now, I will write out music plans for each week on Sundays.
Little E will be attending the church Primary next year starting in January – he’ll be what we call a “Sunbeam” (or “Raio do Sol” in our Portuguese Ward). Each year, at the end of the year, the Primary puts on a special program during our regular worship services highlighting everything they did that year, including singing the songs they have learned. I am hoping to incorporate the Primary songs in our “singing time” as well, so that Little Einstein will have a little head start, and hopefully know all the words by the end of the year. We have access to recordings of the songs, and I have printed music for all of the songs as well (and a piano!) so we should do fine. I’ll probably print pictures to go with the songs, and we’ll play games to learn the music and words. It should be fun, and I think it will really help LE.
Baby E loves to sing, as well, so I am hoping that this will help me help her learn to sing better. She is actually getting really good already.
Today I grabbed a bunch of toy animals from the playroom and tossed them in a bag, then I had LE and BE take turns picking an animal out of the bag and we sang a song about that animal. We had a spider, for which we sang “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” a lamb for “Baa baa Black Sheep” and then most of the other songs came from Janeen Brady’s I Have a Song For You volume about animals. It was a lot of fun, and I think we’ll do it a few more times before I change things up.
Also, my meme from my personal blog, Wednesday Wanderings will be moving here next week. Hopefully it will get more traffic here (as if this blog even gets any traffic!) so check back and link up next week!
I'm so glad you started singing time because we started ours last week! now we can swap ideas! So far we've learned two primary songs "Unserm Vater Danken Wir" for Thanksgiving and "Als Joseph auf die Reise Ging" for Christmas and we've done a couple of German lullabys as well. We do singing time right before bedtime, which works for us. But it doesn't usually last very long. I'm hoping that once our piano leg is fixed (please Derek?!?) we can do singing time before naptime. I kind of like them to have songs in their heads as they fall asleep.
ReplyDeleteOne thing Abby loves is doing hand motions to songs. She can't "sing" like Joshua and I can but she can sing the words she knows and do the motions. And she remembers, so we have motions for things like "augen, ohren gab er mir, kleidung und auch essen" Vater, Mutter" "Bruder, Schwester." etc. We are going to do Christmas songs until after Christmas (you know, to put on a show for the g-parents) and then start doing some other traditional German songs and some more primary songs. Keep me updated on the singing time! I love it!