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Music and Movement Experiences & Videos

This fun and funky medley of "La Bamba" and "Twist and Shout" can be used to assess or work through gross motor goals, cognitive goals and social-emotional goals.  We're going to focus on what social-emotional aspects we're spotlighting in this video:
 
- Creative expression through movement 
- Directional movement of our bodies through a prompted dance (i.e. up and down, side to side, etc)
- Follow along to gross motor prompts (i.e. clapping, stomping, twisting, etc)
- Mirroring high affect
- Social norms via conversation before the song ("What do you like?")
- Encouraging non-verbal communication
- Praising independent interaction

This original experience is called "The Ol' Scarecrow 1-2-3." This is a semi-seasonal movement based experience where we mimic a scarecrow with specific movement prompts, with each verse prompting a different dance move. The video (and overall experience) focuses on gross motor movement, following visual and auditory directives, isolating body movement, identifying body parts, and imagination play. We use videos and pictures of scarecrows in the video to further give the kiddos a visual reference of what a scarecrow looks like. We used chromatic movement on the guitar for the "1, 2, 3" section before each movement to create more anticipation, as well as to include a grounding, repeating pattern.

 This music and movement experience focuses on motor function, language development, cognitive skills and self awareness!  Let's look at the movement goals we're working on through "Mi Cuerpo Hace Musicia:"

- Body awareness
- Gross motor movement (stomping and clapping)
- Crossing the midline (clapping)
- Increasing balance
- Lateral gross motor movement (shaking hips side to side)
- Body part identification
- Following patterns 

This music and movement experience focuses on motor function, language development, cognitive skills and self awareness!  Let's look at the movement goals we're working on through "La La La:" 

- Body awareness
- Gross motor movement (stomping and jumping)
- Isolating body parts (shrugging shoulders and rolling head)
- Crossing the midline (clapping)
- Increasing balance
- Lateral gross motor movement (twist core and shaking hips side to side)
- Body part identification
- Encouraging expression ("dance how ever you want to dance!")
- Increasing language ("la la la")

"When I Woke Up Today" by Laurie Berkner Band

This is one of our all time favorite movement experiences! We've had great success of sustaining kiddos' attention due to the high affect of the "hooray!" in each verse, as well as the engaging single syllable chorus (we LOVE a "la la la" moment).  Especially if you're working in a virtual or hybrid classroom, movement breaks are especially important to allow students to be successful in focusing throughout the day.  Keeping that in mind, we focused on larger gross motor concepts for this experience:
- clapping
- patting knees
- wiggling fingers/body
- spinning around
- jumping

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