Music For Kiddos Podcast
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Do you facilitate preschool or kindergarten music groups? I’m sharing all about how I approach early childhood music groups with you on this blog post.
Before preschool music classes: A backstory
My training and experience as a music therapist has been primarily based on providing one-on-one sessions with kids. Music groups were pretty intimidating to me and I really never facilitate them regularly to actually get a handle on how do do them. That is, until my family and I moved to a small town in Indiana while my husband was pursuing his PhD, and I started to provide music groups at my daughter’s preschool. From my first, utterly disastrous (to me at least!) preschool music group of 25 kids, to facilitating fun and engaging music groups for about 170 kids a week for four years, let’s just say that I learned a TON!
Music for preschoolers and kindergarteners
Throughout these years, not only was I able to develop a system to organize and facilitate early childhood music groups, but this is also how I started writing hundreds of songs and how Music For Kiddos began (completely out of necessity!).
I started writing my own music to get me through these early childhood music groups. I ended up doing preschool music groups for about 170 kids a week for four years while we were there living in Indiana.
I also had a kindergarten class and then a mixed second and third grade class. It was a big learning curve for me but I loved it and I'm so grateful for that experience.
Through that experience, I developed a system that I use to help me organize early childhood groups.
How I facilitate my early childhood music classes
My system to facilitate early childhood music groups is very flexible because I like the ability to transform and cater music to what is needed at the moment. It’s a little bit of a hybrid of improvisational and structured & pre-written but I do it in a very systematic way.
The system that I use, (which is kind of weird to call it a system) it's based on my sensory philosophy that I talked about in this podcast episode of the Music For Kiddos Podcast, making sure that the group has the right kind of flow for the children's sensory systems, also taking into account attention. If we cannot capture a child's attention, we cannot do anything. So it is completely essential that we can capture a child's attention.
Let me share that system with you:
1. I start the group with a familiar hello song, as many people do.
2. Then, I immediately go into the new or cognitively challenging activity because right at the beginning of the group is when I have their attention for them to participate in. We might do a sequencing song, a literacy song, an academic song, etc. (we might do a couple of those).
Repetition is so important at this age. When I say I'm introducing a new song, I'm typically only introducing new ideas to the students about every two or three weeks, because we repeat those new songs at the beginning of the group for several weeks, maybe with a slight variation in there.
By the time we do a hello song and we do two cognitively challenging songs, the kids are usually absolutely ready to move on to the next thing because I'm losing their attention.
I do generally stick to that idea that kids can pay attention for out however many minutes they are old. The idea is that three year olds should probably only be doing the same thing for three minutes and for me, that really seems to work. At around the eight minute point, they're almost guaranteed to be ready to move.
3. The kids stand up and do an active movement song. I like to break movement songs into three different types (and I talk more about those 3 types of movement songs here):
I. First I do a song that is active and stimulating enough that it really satisfies their sensory system. So they're moving around quite a bit, the music is very active.
II. From there, I go into what I call a transitional movement song that is a little bit less active but still allows their bodies to move in a very structured and often quite a bit calm way.
III. If they're still wiggly and it's clear that they're gonna have a hard time paying attention from here on out, we'll do another movement song that I call a cool-down movement song. A cool-down movement song is primarily stretching and breathing. An example of that song is a song called Breathe that is very good for sensory regulation.
4. At this point, we are approaching the end of the group and I typically assess how the group is doing and I choose one of two things:
I. If the kids are still a little bit wiggly and having a hard time sitting, then I often sing a very engaging and or silly music book. I use it as a tool to capture and maintain their attention. Music books as a tool in early childhood music groups are just absolute gold. As long as the kid’s sensory systems are regulated, they can usually sit and listen for quite a long time.
II. If the attention is already there and the kids are ready for something else, what I do at the end of the group is I often pull out some of their very favorite songs from past groups/classes. This is where we do instrument songs, prop songs, or anything else that I have planned for that week, or I've pulled from other lesson plans. If we go from a movement song to props & instruments, then I will often end the group with the music book.
5. We end with a goodbye song
This is kind of an ideal situation but typically after this music class structure, they're sitting quietly and they're ready for the teacher. My goal in these early childhood groups is to “hand them back” to their teachers with their sensory systems regulated. They got their wiggles out. They had the experience of moving. They got to have some active movement, but then I'm able to hand them off to their teacher nice and calm and ready to learn.
6. We sign “goodbye” (ASL)
After we have done the goodbye song, it took me a long time to figure out how we transition from “music is over” to “it's time for you to go back with your teacher.” So, in my case, since I was visiting and doing the music groups in their classrooms, what we would do at the end of the group, is sign goodbye (I taught them goodbye and “thank you for the music”) and silently wave goodbye to each other. I was then able to avoid the chorus of “bye Miss Stephanie!” which is so sweet and so cute, but it goes against that goal of leaving the kids ready to learn with their teachers.
There are so many ways to facilitate early childhood music groups and one of my very favorite things to do is to go watch another music therapist, another music teacher, another clinician lead groups like this because everybody has their own tricks and ideas we can learn. There is no perfect way to do this, but this is just my way of leading music groups for preschool, kindergarten and elementary school kids
And yes, even with this system, my groups sometimes will be a total chaos (that’s normal!) but when they go well, when the transitions work really well, when the kids are paying attention and they're engaged, you know that there's no better feeling..
featured song:
Our movement song “Just Dance.”
This is one of my absolute favorite movement songs and probably the very top favorite movement songs of my students.
🎵 Download the chords and lyrics of the song herE ↓
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