Using Art & Music in Our Infant Curriculum
May 10th, 2013
Using Art and Music in our Infant Curriculum
How does emergent curriculum work for our youngest learners? How can infants be included in mixed age group curriculum?
Infants can be included in many imaginative ways. A 3 - 4 month old is actively exploring with his hands, learning to grasp, hitting hanging objects to produce a desired effect, grasping using fingers, and holding toys and his bottle. He is starting to kick and push his body up and roll over by leveraging with his feet.
So this past week we've been focusing on Hands and Feet. Each day we look at the letters H and F. We trace the letters with our fingers in a sensory alphabet book My First Touch & Trace, First ABC and via using foam letters. We read books: Baby Einstein AlphaBooks: H-Hands and F-Feet; Dr. Seuss' The Foot Book, and Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. We read Sensory Books and touch the different textures: Baby Touch and Feel's: Farm Animals and Cuddly Animals. We sing rhymes and songs: This Little Piggy; This is Me; Handsome Hands (cleanup song).
Engaging in music, while practicing fine and gross motor skills is easy too. Small Maracas, rattles and egg shakers allow baby to hold various shapes, while using his arm and hands to shake them and produce music. Holding a tambourine at baby's feet, and helping him contact it with his foot while saying kick with your feet, produces a new sound. This creates excitement and encourages baby to kick on his own. A drum maybe used as well. We also use these instruments for baby's hands and say touch or push with your hand. We hang the tambourine from a play gym, where baby can kick on his own or hit with his hands and produce his own music, while practicing motor skills on a moving target.
At the end of this week we created a Mother's Day card. We painted baby's toes while saying we are making Mommy a present. We are painting your toes with green paint and we press it on the paper to start a butterfly. Next we say: "now we'll paint your foot with green paint"; baby curls his toes from the feel of the soft brush, Facilitator says: "It is soft and tickles! We press your foot and make the leaves and two caterpillars-- one, two. Now we clean your feet". We sing a song while we clean baby's feet. "Now we are going to make beautiful butterfly wings, we paint your hand with orange paint" Baby squishes the paint between his fingers and laughs. The Facilitator says: "Paint is soft and squishy in your fingers!" and "now we press your hand to the paper this way, up and now that way, down. Look how pretty!" We clean baby's hands and sing Handsome Hands.
After the picture dries, The Facilitator adds the body part names: Hands near the wings, Toes near the body and Feet near the caterpillars/leaves, she also adds some finishing touches, like defining lines and a flower with markers and writes a greeting from Baby to Mommy and reads it to baby. The Facilitator tells baby "let's take your picture for Mommy" she takes baby's picture holding the card and pastes it on the inside of the card with a special note to Mommy. Baby has experienced a culminating activity to all of his learning about Hands and Feet over the past week. He has experienced art and we have created documentation of this process through a beautiful piece of art, while creating a moment in time keepsake for Mommy.
