Creative Sound Play for Young Learners

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.

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.

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