The Revised EYFS in Practice by Langston Ann;Doherty Jonathan; & Dr. Jonathan Doherty

Author:Langston, Ann;Doherty, Jonathan; & Dr. Jonathan Doherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Music, Movement and Dance

Moving to music is as natural to children as breathing – even small babies move rhythmically when they hear sounds and babies of eight or nine months will bob up and down to singing, clapping and rhythmic sounds. Dance is a natural progression from music and ‘is thought to foster healthy development in a wide variety of domains, including self-image, self-body awareness, and self-esteem; coping with emotional and cognitive challenges; concentration and focus; tolerance and respect for diverse others; emotional expression and understanding; tension relief and emotional release; self-control; problem solving, decision making, taking responsibility, making adjustments and adaptations and testing alternatives.’74 However, until recently, while these claims had been made, there was little research in this area, though there is now a greater interest. Nevertheless some supporting evidence of the value of dance comes from research conducted with children aged between 39 and 62 months in a Head Start programme some of whom took part in an eight week session of structured movement activities. These children were encouraged to continuously invent movements while a randomly assigned control group followed normal play activities. It was found the ‘movement’ group made significant gains in their social skills at the same time as achieving significant improvements in their self-management (behaviour) over the course of the program, whereas the children not exposed to the dance program showed little progress in either measure.75 Another piece of research carried out by Sacha and Russ with pre-school children using the concept of imagery to help children visualise movements or ideas (such as jumping over a pile of imaginary leaves or reaching out to allow a pretend bird to light on their hand) found that compared with children in a control group the visual imagery group took less time ‘to master the skill, and showed’ [better] ‘long-term recall and prompting, initial attentiveness, and long-term enjoyment’.76

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.