Presented by Ellen Acuna, In-School Services Representative and Teaching Specialist
Sponsored by Music Together
As all educators know, young children are natural scientists! Driven by their innate curiosity, they explore, experiment, and ask questions as they learn about the world around them. In this way, scientific inquiry and understanding begin in early childhood. Providing children with active and participatory music experiences can be an enjoyable way to support the development of scientific thinking and understanding in fun and developmentally appropriate ways.
In this edWebinar, Ellen Acuna, In-School Services Representative and Teaching Specialist, explores the National Science Teachers Association’s key principles to guide the learning of science among young children and discuss how music experiences can support these principles. She demonstrates how songs, rhythmic chants, instrument play, and other music activities can support many of the science benchmarks listed in state early learning standards that have a science domain.
Learn new musical tools to use to support young students’ engagement in scientific exploration and understanding, laying the foundation for future science learning in K-12. This recorded session will be of particular benefit to educators working with toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergartners.
About the Presenter
Ellen Acuna has nineteen years of experience as an early childhood music and movement specialist working with children birth through age five and their parents and caregivers. She has enjoyed bringing music education to a variety of different settings, including a School for the Deaf where she worked with deaf and hard of hearing children, a center for teenage moms with their babies, working with the elderly and young children in intergenerational classes, and a variety of other outreach programs. Ellen has a B.A. from West Chester State College (now West Chester University), where she studied speech communications. In addition to being a Music Together In-School teaching mentor for other music and movement specialists, she presents professional development workshops for music specialists and classroom teachers, and has presented at national conferences.
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At Music Together, we understand the importance of music in early childhood—from birth, in fact. Because the truth is, most people are born with enough music aptitude to play in a symphony orchestra when they are adults, if they choose. But first we must learn how to “speak music”—to take the musical instrument we all have, ourselves, developing that musical capacity from a very young age. The sounds we make, our movements, our rhythms—these are the building blocks of music and of early childhood learning. And that’s what Music Together is all about.