[HANASHIR:9900] Re: pre-school music

[Eric Simon <erics...>]

At 08:17 PM 9/20/01 -0400, Julia Priest wrote:
>I am concerned about competitive singing, mostly because I _think_ children
>should not be asked to sing louder.

This depends on the age.  I teach kids from pre-school thru grade 7.  I use
competitive singing (just as one of many tools) mostly for grades 5 and
higher.  (It's often very hard to motivate older kids where many don't want
to be there to begin with, and many thinking singing is "uncool")

At 08:03 PM 9/20/01 +0000, Carol Boyd Leon wrote:
>My 2 cents on creative repetition with various groupings of students is that 
>it's a wonderful concept and can work quite well in elementary grades, but 
>when the kids are 2 and 3 years old and some aren't even talking yet, it's 
>just not going to work.  They're just not in "performance mode" or even 

Certainly 'competitive singing' doesn't work for youngers ones, and for
that age any 'performance' will not work.

But that doesn't mean we still can't do "creative repetition".

For example: when teaching the Shma to pre-schoolers (just the first line).
 First I sing it.  Then I ask the kids to count the words in it.  A few
will get the right number (six).  So I do it again with everyone counting.
Then I sing it a fourth time, asking the kids to listen to see which word
is repeated.  Then a fifth time so that everyone else can verify the answer
to be correct.  And now they've heard it five times without getting bored,
because each time they were listening for some other reason.  And so on.

Of couse, _this_ technique doesn't save on your voice (which is how the
thread started, I think)!.  But I just wanted to make clear that one can
get very creative when doing creative repetition!

-- Eric

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