1st Edition
Creative Sound Play for Young Learners A Teacher’s Guide to Enhancing Transition Times, Classroom Communities, SEL, and Executive Function Skills
This fun and engaging guide invites you to use sound-making as a collaborative, play-based practice in your early childhood classroom—first to transform tricky transition times and ultimately to support your children’s executive functioning development and social-emotional learning. The book offers techniques and ideas for every teacher to reach every child in their classroom including verbal, nonverbal, and special needs children. Easy to integrate into all standard early years curricula, it focuses on three basic elements of sound: pitch, volume, and duration. The book features an "overview of the school year" calendar and an implementation guide, in addition to a variety of suggested sound-making activities that start out simply and, through the course of the book, expand to engage children’s creativity in more dynamic ways. Creative Sound Play for Young Learners is key reading for any preschool teacher, leader, or parent.
Part A – Why Sound? 1. Dear Teachers 2. The Nuts and Bolts of Sound and Silence 3. Helping All Children Grow Intellectually, Emotionally, Socially, and Physically by Making Sound and Silence 4. Sound-Making Develops Social-Emotional Learning 5. Enhancing Children’s Executive Functions with Creative Sound Play 6. Reflection 7. Mastering Sound-Making Leads to Agency and Independence 8. The Power of Providing Opportunity and Positive Expectation 9. The Four C’s: Collaboration, Creativity, Compromise, and Community 10. Engaging Mindfulness 11. Better Lessons with Sound-making B – Implementing Creative Sound Play 12. Developing Executive Function Using the Five Primary Elements of Sound 13. Using Variation and Added Complexity 14. The 12 Sound Activities 15. Transferring the 12 Sound Activities to Hand Percussion Instruments 16. Creating Sound Sculptures for Public Performance C – Creative Sound Play and Special Needs 17. The History of Creative Sound Play through Special Needs D – Daily and Yearly Calendar, and Schedule for Working with Sound 18. Approaching the School Year 19. Overview of the School Year 20. Year-at-a-Glance by Month 21. The Weekly Schedule for Learning the 12 Sound Activities
Biography
Hayes Greenfield is a musician, composer, sound artist, and educator, and has been working with young people in all kinds of capacities since the early 90s. Hayes teaches his course Effective Transitions Essentials at the Academy, the National Head Start Association’s online professional development teaching portal, and offers a video course with the Global Childhood Academy and from his Creative Sound Play website.
“Creative Sound Play is one of the most thoughtful and direct approaches of which I am aware to help children build self-regulation skills through fun, creative, and engaging activities. The fact that it manages to encapsulate so much within a set of readily implementable, fun and engaging activities for children is nothing short of amazing.” – Clancy Blair, Professor, Department of Applied Psychology, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University
"One of the things I love about Creative Sound Play is that it uses something as simple as sound, which is ever present and doesn’t need anything expensive to do. Creative Sound Play helps to support so many of the things that are critical for the best executive functions because it creates joy, helps to reduce stress, and builds community." – Adele Diamond, PhD, FRSC, Canada Research Chair Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Head of Program in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
"Imagine that as a teacher you have the opportunity to bring a well-known, experienced and exuberant musician to your class. Now imagine that this musician has spent decades creating no-cost, easy-to-do sound activities that help you and your children manage everyday classroom transitions. Finally, imagine that these activities promote the most important life and learning skills there are—executive function skills. That’s what you get with Hayes Greenfield’s Creative Sound Play. It's truly magic!” – Ellen Galinsky, President of Families and Work Institute and Author of Mind in the Making and The Breakthrough Years
“This supercalifragilisticexpialidocious book demonstrates the power of sound for growing 21st Century skills. Greenfield shows us the joy of using sound exercises — loud and soft, short and long, to build self control, communication and collaboration in school and beyond. So listen up and see for yourself why 'Lend me your Ears' offers teachers and parents new and powerful tools to help all kids thrive. What fun!” – Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Professor, Temple University, Senior fellow, Brookings
