Boogie Mites Music Club

Helping your Child Develop School Ready Skills Through Music | Boogie Mites

With just a month to go until Year R places are allocated, many parents will be thinking about how they can help their child to get ready for their transition to big school. 👩‍🎓🧑‍🎓

Take a look at our blog all about helping your child to develop school-ready skills through music:

Helping your Child Develop School Ready Skills Through Music | Boogie Mites Sounds Before Letters You may have heard the term ‘school readiness’ in the press, there has been a lot of publicity recently for research that finds about half of the children starting school (Reception year) in 2022 were not developmentally ready (School Readiness 2022 survey by Kindred2 publi...

It's WHY MUSIC WEDNESDAY! 🧐🎵

Learning about opposites is an important part of development. Understanding opposites, and the language associated with opposites, is an important part of communication and language development, as children learn to compare and contrast two or more different things.

Once children understand the concept of opposites, they develop a deeper understanding of such concepts (e.g volume - loud vs quiet) and improve their ability to describe things - a key skill later on for reading and comprehension. Teaching our children about opposites increases their higher order thinking skills, as well as develops their vocabulary.

We can use music to teach our children about opposites by singing or playing our homemade instruments in contrasting ways. For example, here at Boogie Mites, we often begin our sessions with a warm up where we sing "Hello High - Hello Low" and then explore other opposite ways of using our voices, such as "Hello Loudly - Hello Quietly", "Hello Fast - Hello Slow."

We also encourage the children to play their instruments in different contrasting ways, using concepts that they may already be familiar with, to really anchor those ideas; for example we might bang our drums loudly and slowly like an elephant stomping, and then quietly and quickly like a little mouse running.

Why not try and think of some opposite ways that you can play your homemade instruments, and start exploring opposites together with your child?

Happy boogie-ing!

Keeping the beat is the foundation of language and communication, rhythmic awareness and phonological awareness.
As humans, we are designed to respond to a steady beat; we instinctively tap our feet, clap our hands or nod our head to music; we even have our own steady beat internalised within us in the form of our heartbeat.

📦🥁 Keeping the beat impacts on our gross and fine motor skills, and our spatial awareness, as we strive to move in time to the beat.
📦🥁 It helps us to develop our pattern recognition, as we experience the steady pattern of the ongoing rhythm.
📦🥁 It increases our neural responses to language, as the brain uses the same neurological pathways for music as it does for language.
📦🥁 It helps us to develop our phonological awareness as we match beat patterns to syllables in words, whether that's through speech, stories, songs or rhymes.

You can use lots of things found around the home as a drum and play along to the beat in a song or rhyme..... a cardboard box, a formula tin, a plastic lunchbox, an ice-cream tub..... the list is endless.

Feel the beat...... with Boogie Mites.

It's FUN-DAY FRIDAY! 🥳🎉

Some of you may be thinking about how you can help your pre-schoolers to be "school ready" for September. One way is by preparing them for their first big adventure into the world of phonics. Before children can begin to really understand how sounds create words, and how to blend and segment, they need to begin to develop their phonological awareness; that is to say, they need to begin to hear, recognise and distinguish sounds.

🥾🥾 One of the best ways to introduce children to the concept of really actively listening to sounds is to go on a sound walk. This can be inside or outside (although outside is always more fun). At various points during your walk, encourage your child to close their eyes, listen, and try to tell you what they think they can hear. It might be the birds singing, cars zooming by, other people talking, children playing, crunchy leaves underfoot....... it all depends on where you are! But in actively listening and tuning in to different sounds, they will begin to develop their phonological awareness and be more engaged in, and aware of, the array of different sounds that accompany our everyday lives. This in turn helps to sharpen their auditory skills and prepares them for distinguishing between sounds in words.

👂👂 So why not take advantage of the beautiful weather this week, and go on a sound walk together? You could even introduce this idea with a craft activity, making a listening crown with big ears!

Happy Boogie-ing!

If you're a childminder who uses Boogie Mites, then we'd LOVE to hear from you!
We are looking for testimonials about our music and programmes from childminders. If you're happy to provide one, then please send a few short sentences to: [email protected]
🤩🤩 THANKYOU! 🤩🤩

What a busy few days we had at the Childcare & Education Expo! Head over to our Instagram to see more of the fun, including our very own singer-songwriter and creative director Harriet, leading a room full of grown ups with our new song, Jazz Hands Dinosaur! 😂💚🦖

Keeping the beat is a vital skill for young children. It helps to develop their rhythmic awareness, and stresses certain syllables in a rhyme or song. This, in turn, helps our children to explore patterns and sequences, feeding in to them learning about the order of language sounds.
Feel the beat......
......with Boogie Mites!

It's THINKING THURSDAY! 🧠

We know from the neuroscience research that music helps our brain develop. When we make music, our cognitive function is improved as we exercise our reasoning skills, our problem-solving skills, our memory capability, and increase our brain resiliency.

*With thanks to Bigger Better Brains for this quote/image*

Boogie Mites

Did you know that we have a Sound Cloud 👂☁️ channel, where you can sample LOADS of Boogie Mites Songs for FREE????
Take a look here!

Boogie Mites Our Mission: To enable Early Years practitioners and parents to harness the scientifically proven learning power of music, so that all children maximise their potential. Our Products: Complete music

FUN-DAY FRIDAY! 🎉

This weekend, why not help your children to get arty with some freezer-bag painting?
This activity brings lots of opportunities for young children to explore in a sensory way, have a go at mark-making, feel different textures, see how colours mix, experience cause and effect, and of course create a masterpiece!

This is a quick and easy craft. All you need to do is secure a freezer bag or ziplok bag to a flat surface, and put two or three blobs of paint inside. Make sure that all four sides of the bag are completely sealed (for younger children, you could sellotape all four sides down onto their highchair tray) before encouraging your child to push the paint around by moving their fingers on the top of the bag.

Aside from helping your child to develop their fine motor skills through mark-making, this is also a great opportunity for introducing or reinforcing colour names, and for talking together about what happens as the colours merge and mix.

We'd love to see your children's finished freezer bag art pictures in our comments section!

Happy Boogie-ing!

It's WHY MUSIC WEDNESDAY! 🧐🎵

Using actions with music is a great way to encourage our children to follow instructions or follow the leader.

Children often enjoy playing copycat games to music, copying and joining in with repeated dance moves, which gives them a sense of achievement, whilst encouraging them to stay active. I think it's fair to say some adults do, also! (Macarena, anyone?!)

But how can we use this fun activity in everyday life? How about, using music to encourage our children to follow instructions?

Language is processed in the left hemisphere of the brain. Music is a multisensory activity - it activates all areas of our brain at once, and so adding music to spoken instructions, taps into all areas of the brain, giving our hearing and understanding skills a little boost.

The next time you've repeatedly asked your child over and over to do something (put on your coat/shoes/ get your bag!), try singing it to a familiar tune, such as "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush" and watch the magic happen!

Happy Boogie-ing!

FUN-DAY FRIDAY! 🥳🎉

Following on from last week's sea theme, this week's FunDay Friday suggestion is to make a paper plate jellyfish!
This activity really helps to develop children's fine motor skills, as (with the help of their grown-up) they press down on a hole punch, and thread the wool or string through the holes, then use pens or stickers to create a face or decorate the jellyfish body.

As with many crafts, this also gives you the opportunity to widen your child's vocabulary as you talk about colours, textures, choice of materials, size and shape.

Why not get crafty this weekend, and make a paper plate jellyfish together? As always, we'd love to see your creations, so don't forget to tag us or post them to our pages!

Happy Boogie-ing!

THINKING THURSDAY! 🧠

When we learn to read music in order to play an instrument or sing from sheet music, we learn a set of skills in a progressive order. First, we learn what a written note looks like and the sound a note makes. When we know a few notes, we might begin to learn how to blend some together to make a chord, and how to hear a chord and segment or pick out which notes are within in. And, as we become more confident with exploring groups of notes and chords, we learn which notes work well together to achieve a desired effect - for example a happy sounding major chord, or an ominous sounding minor chord.

These same skills can be applied to reading words.
To decode a word, we need to first learn which sound a letter makes. Then we learn to begin to blend sounds to read the whole word, and how to break down a word into separate sounds in order to help us read them. And as we progress through the phonic phases, we learn that letters can be grouped together into digraphs or trigraphs to make new sounds (for example, taking 's' and 'h' to make a 'sh' sound.)

The brain uses the same neurological pathways to process music as it uses for language.

*With thanks to Better Brains for this quote/image*

We're developing an app and we'd love YOU to join us as co-creators!

The app is designed to help you support your child's early language and literacy at home with fun songs the whole family will enjoy.

We've teamed up with "We're Going On A Bear Hunt" author, Michael Rosen , to create musical poems to inspire your child's love of reading; and we have letter sound songs introduced with professional storyteller Rohini Vij from . Our third category, "Topical Tunes" contains lots of songs based on many favourite themes.

If your child's learning and development is important to you AND you want to support you child using the power of creative music-making then please help us to develop the very best app we can, by becoming a Boogie Mites Ambassador. Once you're signed up, you will receive free access to our trial online version of the app; with lots of songs and videos to enjoy and learn with.

Drop us a 💚 in the comments and use this link to sign up!

https://ex246.infusionsoft.app/app/form/boogie-mites-ambassador-sign-up