Cities! Lesson 5

Hello again....it has been another eventful week for me and it will get even more exciting by this weekend and the whole of next week. I will be helping out at Vacation Bible School next week at my church. We are going to have about 300 kids congregating at the church for 5 days from 8:30am - 12:45 pm! I will be helping out in the craft station, helping the kids while they have fun cutting, pasting and hopefully making some wonderful crafts. Hopefully I will survive but if you dont see my blog next week, you know I am just super busy with this.

Anyway lesson 5....We are going to start off with My Bike, a rhythmic chant accompanied by sign language (ASL) and various hand movements as we learn the different functions of a bicycle. It will be done as an echo....which means the kids learn to imitate and listen to me before it's their turn to chant the words. We will be signing the word 'bicycle' and 'listen'.

We learn about our speaking and singing voice with Pretzels for Sale last week. This week we will be playing a singing game with the song. I quote from Song Play: A Collection of Playful Songs for Children, by Peggy Bennet:

By participating in singing games, children develop social skills that prepare them for adulthood, including:

-taking turns and waiting for turns,
- working cooperatively,
- observing and accepting others' ideas,
- gaining skills and confidence in being a leaden and a follower and
- watching, listening to and speaking to one another.

This activity will reinforce what we learn last week about our singing voice an gives each child a chance to sing solo.

The next activity focuses on auditory discrimination, by using the City Square Listening Game. Practicing auditory discrimination by listening to a series of sound collages and differentiating among various sounds allows the children to gain experience using different types of attention. These attention skills are necessary for later success in speech perception and reading. ( excerpt from Teacher's Guide)

- focused attention - concentration on a single task.
- sustained attention - concentration on a task over an extended period over time.
- shifted attention - moving between tasks while holding in mind task instructions and manipulating information.
- divided attention - performing tow or more tasks concurrently.

Introducing a new song, 1, 2, 3 Click! a song about taking pictures while we move around the city. Since this is the first time we are doing this song, we will be just singing and introducing the concept of photo taking in this lesson. I will explain more about the musicality of this song next week.

We will also be reinforcing the rhythm of Jing Jang as the kids take turns playing the rhythm on the glockenspiel.

Parent sharing time, we will be playing a variety of percussion instruments to Hey Lolly while we take turns playing different instruments to the unique rhythm of this song.

I see you in class this week.....