An excellent listen

Hello all! A very busy week around here - apologies for not posting until now. I might even get two posts in tonight if I'm tricky!


I listened to a fantastic piece on National Radio today, about the profound effects of music on our young friends - it even made mention of Kindermusik Village! It was an interview with Greta Bradman, an amazing singer who has studied developmental psychology and neurophysiology, focussing on the impact of music on the brain. 


I highly recommend you take a few minutes to have a listen :) It will reinforce that you really are making the best choice for your child by being a part of our wonderful Kindermusik family.


Radio New Zealand - Kathryn Ryan interviewing Greta Bradman

Birds Making Music :)

Just a tiny post from me this week, I hope everyone's been enjoying listening to the birds singing us beautiful songs, reminding us that spring is just around the corner!


Here is a most wonderful link to explore at home, the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in Wellington has a great website, and on it we discovered a page dedicated to the songs of our native birds. We've been having a fantastic time playing the sound clips, and listening to the ways Jarvis responds to them! 

As always, the fantail is his favourite ;)

Remember, imitating sounds is a fantastic way for our little ones to get ready for speech, and it's lots of fun too!

http://www.sanctuary.org.nz/Site/Conservation_and_Research/Birds_sounds.aspx

Feathered Friends :)

What a fantastic Feathers class we had yesterday!! The lovely  Sal brought along her real live feathered friend to meet us :) Our Kindermusik Village class thought La La was just wonderful - especially when he came out of his house & sat on Sal's shoulder. 


Birds are nature's most wonderful music makers - and La La very happily joined in when we sang our songs. It was a shame poor Jarvis wasn't feeling well and was exiled from the class (and went on an outing with his Dad!), he loves echoing La La's squeals!


Echoing interesting sounds and exploring what their voices can do is a great language acquisition tool for our small friends, by listening and experimenting they learn how to use their mouths in different ways to make different sounds, a very important precursor to using real words. So, spending some time with the birds is a very useful way to spend an afternoon!


There are lots of ways of encouraging lovely wildlife to come and sing to you - and one of these is to leave them something tasty to eat! Try this recipe out - it's from the NZ Forest & Bird website :)


Bird Pudding...
1 - 2 cups of fat
Crumbled up stale bread, biscuits or birdseed
Honey
Bacon Rinds


Place the fat, honey and bacon rinds in a bowl. Stand in another bowl filled with boiling water. When the fat begins to melt, add the crumbs or birdseed. Stir the mixture to combine, and squish into a ball shape. When it's cooled down, put your bird pudding ball into a mesh bag (like the ones you buy onions in!), and hang it in a tree. You can also put out a tasty drink for your feathered visitors - they love sweetened water! Make sure you put it all up high enough that any passing cats don't interrupt the party :) 


We're inviting our native birds into our Kindermusik classroom as well as into our garden - the class created a very cool version of 'Who's Making All that Noise' this week. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can come up with next week!


Musically yours,
Kath :)


PS...Jarvis missed his friends terribly this week - hopefully he'll be back on board next Tuesday!