Sorting & Categorizing Sounds with Preschoolers

Parenting Tip:  Create sound effects for a song – like the Mud Puddle Dance!

 

Why?

Sorting and categorizing sounds strengthens listening acuity and the ability to hear and understand.

In addition to fostering your child's budding musicianship skills, this leads to better phonemic awareness and boosts reading abilities.

 

How?

Discover fun indoor activities to participate in when the weather outside is frightful ;)  (Like 'kleenex snowflakes,' and 'paper plate ice skates!'). 

For more snow fun, make a snow globe!  Once the snow is falling, turn on the 'Snowflakes Are Falling' from Kindermusik's "Outside My Window" CD, and sing along! 

Cue up a song, like 'Mud Puddle Dance,' or 'It Rained a Mist,' from Kindermusik's "Outside My Window" CD.  Can you use jingle bells (or other sound-makers from around the house) to add some pitter patter, drip drop, or splash rhythms, as the music plays? 

 

Want to Learn More?

On our blog - read how rhythm skills may be a predictor of future reading disabilities, and how music can act as an early-intervention strategy for children with those challenges!

Kindermusik 7-year Continuum:

Kindermusik babies enjoy exploring instruments, and discovering how to make sound, through cause & effect.  Toddlers explore instruments, and discover multiple ways to keep the beat with those instruments.  Kindermusik preschoolers decide which instruments to use to make different sound effects (Sparkly metal sounds for the sun?  Rolling shakers on the floor to create rain showers?  Tapping a cymbal to create thunder?) As big kids in Young Child classes, students choose sound makers from home to create an appropriate musical backdrop to poems, like The Weather Story (about the cycle of a thunderstorm).