Language and Literacy, Rhythm and Rhyme Workshop - Expo 2024
We travelled to Olympia London the first weekend of March for the annual Childhood & Education Expo, where we had an exhibition stand and a slot on the interactive workshop stage to co-present our Literacy & Language, Rhythm & Rhyme workshop with well-loved children’s author and former Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen.
Music and Movement are key to speech and language. UK reports show that there are currently two million children struggling with talking and understanding words. This figure has risen year upon year. Most of us take these skills for granted. We don’t think about what our life would be like if we found this difficult. Two million children are living this reality.
Closing the School Ready Attainment Gap
Daily music & movement and rhythm & rhyme in early years, holds the key to closing the school ready attainment gap.
The neural pathways and networks for speech and language overlap with those for music. Group music activities are a fantastic way to engage with children, promoting confidence, self-expression, self-regulation and group social skills.
Neuroscience shows us that active music making is a whole brain activity, when we actively engage in music, we’re developing cross curricular skills, all of which will support our children to be fit to learn in a school environment.
Through daily music activities, we’re giving children the gift of language and providing strong foundations for literacy. Broadening vocabulary, emphasising syllables through deliberate beat patterning and playing with rhyme and alliteration. And it’s as much fun for the educators as the children!
Bangedy Bang Bang
Bangedy Bang Bang from our Interactive Workshop at the Childcare and Education Expo 2024
Play Video about Bangedy Bang Bang
Boogie Mites uses mainly original songs that give children a wide and varied experience of musical sounds. All of our songs are underpinned by a strong steady beat, and draw on many different genres of music with different rhythms, melodies and harmonies to supercharge the sound processing system. We also understand the importance of nursery rhymes, we give them a twist and include them in our music activities.
Our Boogie Mites web-app: Building Strong Foundations For Language and Literacy through Music, aims to give home educators and families the ideas, music and resources for evidence based shared music activities – role modelling it as well through engaging, uplifting videos. The full app contains 66 song videos, but when you subscribe, you can trial 18 songs for the first month completely free.
There are three categories of songs in the web-app, including Musical Poems, which were written in collaboration with Michael Rosen.
Michael Rosen spoke at our Interactive Workshop
“It’s wonderful to hear what you have been saying. It’s a great reminder that when we talk about language, it’s very easy to think of language as somehow or other just floating around in our heads. In actual fact, language is physical. Just think about it, I am speaking to you now and you are getting soundwaves from here to you in your ears. This is coming up because I’m vibrating the vocal folds in my throat, putting air through it and that’s coming to you; all that is physical.
We forget that about language – we have a whole apparatus to produce it, your lungs, your ribs – all that is producing it. Even when we talk about language on the page, it is still physical. It’s there in print on paper, or on a screen with electronic pulses. When we do this with our bodies, we are just carrying on the basic principle. Watch an animal – watch a cat when it meows – we are doing the same thing. We are doing something physical.
There is something strange about education that quite we often detach language from the physical, and that’s partly what makes it so difficult for children. So, when we connect it to rhyme, rhythm, music, movement, then we are reconnecting it with our animal selves. And that’s so important. When you say “tum-tiddy-tum-tum, tum-tum”, children will move without you telling them to. Why’s that? They are remembering what you are saying in their bodies. The words attach to the movement, and you get body memory, and that’s ever so important.” Michael Rosen
Subscribe to our web-app
You can sign up to trial the music activities on our web-app here: https://www.boogiemites.co.uk/shop/boogie-mites-app/
Our aim is to boost focus and attention, support pre-phonics skills and literacy, support language development, and generally have smiling faces, happy vibes and dancing feet.
You can watch the Boogie Mites Childcare and Education Expo24 Interactive Workshop on Music and Movement, Rhythm and Rhyme on YouTube:
