Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/fall-fa-la-la-celebrating-the-season-through-music-and-movement/5026130/
Music making is a natural outlet for creativity and self-expression, and young children possess an innate tendency to express themselves musically. Immersing children in “intentionally responsive, play-based, developmentally appropriate music engagement opportunities” (National Association for Music Educators, 2018) respects their abilities as music makers. Providing autumn-related music activities that emphasize playing, singing, and moving is an authentic and pleasurable way for children to encounter the richness of seasonal changes and traditional happenings, while also promoting socialization, feelings of belonging, physical abilities, and cognitive development.
Chants, Poems, and Songs
Vocal exploration, which is experimenting with the ways the voice can sound, is a crucial music skill for young children, because one’s ability to make new sounds diminishes with age. While not sung, fingerplays, rhymes, and chants provide varied opportunities for children to explore their voices. They also offer opportunities to practice auditory discrimination, while laying a foundation for phonemic awareness tasks such as hearing, identifying, and manipulating individual sounds in spoken words (Gromko, 2005). Short poems like “The Floppy Scarecrow” give children the opportunity for vocal exploration as they speak in different pitches.
“The Witch Has an Itch,” by Donna Guthrie, uses a four-line poem that recurs four times. The first two lines ...