Today, for our final class of the year, we sang a bunch of our favourite songs and got out the bells and did some jingling all the way! PIA wanted to have a little party for us, so we sang a bunch and then finished off by eating some goodies all together. It was a great ending to a great season.
Today we had three new kids join us for our class! One was keen to get singing and dancing right from the get-go, but our other two got into the dancing, in particular, about half way through. It was a real movin' and groovin' class today, with kids who wanted to be dancing, hopping, or "swimming" the whole time!
This week we had a small group made up of our youngest singers, so we focused a lot of our singing on songs that involve singing about and pointing to different parts of our bodies. It's always really exciting when young ones who have been participating for a number of weeks suddenly "get it" and go from mostly observing to enthusiastically pointing to their noses, ears, cheeks, toes, heads, eyes, knees, and so on!
One of our favourite active songs with this group is when we sing "Well you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you STOP!" Our group is great at walking around, and are always keen to STOP at just the right time (and giggle!). We also did some tiptoeing, marching, and gliding, and it's great to see the kids learn how to use their bodies in different ways as we move to the beat of our song!
We really got our Halloween groove on today by singing lots of songs about pumpkins, witches, wind, howling, costumes, and sleeping bats! Our little singers were especially great at sleeping upside down like bats, and then flying around once night came.
We have what can often be a very active group of 2-3 year olds, so the more active we can be in our singing, the better! Today we sang Sleeping Bunnies and once everyone got the hang of when to "sleep" and when to hop, then we couldn't stop! Even after four rounds of the song, those little bunnies could have hopped on forever!
Since it's October, we're starting to learn some fall songs, including ones about pumpkins and Halloween! While we did the rhyme 5 Little Pumpkins, there was a lot of participation when the 4th pumpkin says, "Let's run, and run, and run!" We pumped our arms like we were running fast, and got lots of giggles with it as well!
Our group definitely has some great rhythm - there was lots of clapping, knee slapping, and foot stomping, all right on cue - especially in Clap Your Hands and Sing 1, 2, 3! We also have some BIG fans of the parachute in this group; from the moment it came out until the moment it was put away, our group was dancing and giggling under the parachute.
We had a great time getting into the groove both musically and in terms of the structure of our class today! Some of the members of our class had a hard time sitting for the first bit, so we brought in lots of standing and moving songs. However, sitting for the Instrument of the Week and our jam time was no trouble at all! Our group was right into making their own sounds and music!
We had a fun-filled end to our session. Normally the final class of a session is filled with requests, so I asked the group for suggestions. We played through all of their favourites: (ABCs, Old MacDonald...). Then, I brought out the Djembe for Five Little Monkeys. We took turns playing before our extended instrument jam.
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