Using Movement and Music to Address Learning Difficulties

For the first while in our homeschool we're going to lay off the academics and focus on finding our feet. Well, not just our feet, our whole body and all 12 (yes 12!) senses.

Touch
Life
Self-Movement
Balance
Smell
Taste
Sight
Temperature/Warmth
Hearing
Language
Concept
Ego

We're going to do an intensive two week long "Extra Lesson" with lots of movement exercises, relaxation techniques, making sounds (which handily enough happens when you sing!) and curative drawing, painting, and modelling.

I'm working on a circle time that can address all of Nature Girl's needs while being unselfconscious enough to involve Wild Thing and Sprout if they want to be involved.

Circle was a disaster with Darkmirror. As a preschooler he was so disruptive in playgroup circle time that we were often asked to leave. His kindergarten teachers pulled out their hair and started going grey dealing with his outbursts. When it came to homeschooling there was no way he was going to be subjected to more circle time work! So I had to sneak in these things in different ways. It was a constantly evolving process, sometimes successful, sometimes not.

Nature Girl is so very different, and the dynamic in our house is different. She loves group activities and gentle cooperative games. She loves helping Wild Thing and Sprout learn to do things, and her unselfconscious patient teaching personality will bve a great help in what we need to do.

We need to go back and give her the experiences she missed in kindergarten and grade one. Things she missed in an academic program that kept a pace she couldn't follow.

There are 5 books living on my bedside table right now

The Extra Lesson: Movement, Drawing and Painting Exercises to Help Children with Difficulties in Writing, Reading and Arithmetic by Audrey McAllen

Take Time: Movement Exercises for Parents, Teachers and Therapists of Children with Difficulties in Speaking, Reading, Writing and Spelling by Mary Nash Wortham & Jean Hunt

Putting the Heart back into Teaching by Stanford Maher & Yvonne Bleach

Enki Education's Kindergarten Circle Materials (sensory integration in game form)

and my childhood tome of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes