Classroom Close-Up
Jazmine, a preschool teacher, reflects on her children’s explorations of sound.
- “The kids and I love storybooks that have words that imitate the sounds that things make. For example, in the story Jonathan and His Mommy, Irene Smalls uses words that sound like the sounds your feet make as you skip down the street. After we read the book, we got up and skipped around our room, listening to our feet making the sounds that Irene Smalls had described.”
- “Books like Buzz! by Janet Wong led us into conversations about the way different sounds can make us feel. We talked about sounds that make us feel scared, happy, sad, and excited. The kids drew pictures of some of their favorite sounds and then I recorded them making those sounds. I played the recording back to the group, and the kids tried to guess who was making each sound and what it was. They all listened really closely and many times they guessed the person and the sound correctly!”
- “Learning to label the pitch of an instrument or a rubber band as “high” or “low” was very challenging for my kids. To build a solid foundation, we spent a lot of time playing with our own voices: talking in high, squeaky voices like mice or mosquitoes or little baby birds, and in deep, low voices like giants or big heavy trucks.”