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Rhythmicity for your Children The full-time job of a child
is to learn how to be an adult.
Your children will imitate everything you do. This is how a child learns to be an adult. If you perform rhythmic activities where your child sees it, your child will do the same. This might be dancing to music as you prepare food for the family. This might be walking with your child. This might be bouncing on a trampoline or exercise ball with your child. This might be dribbling a basketball. You need to give your children an environment where rhythmic activities are normal. Rhythm needs to be an important part of the life of a child from infancy to adulthood. Our experience is that children who learn rhythmicity, dramatically improve their academic and athletic performance. Even their social interactions improve as a result of learning timing and rhythmicity. Infant Bouncing: You can provide daily bouncing for your infant by sitting on an exercise ball or the edge of the bed holding your child, and bouncing yourself. You can hold your child and bounce on a mini-trampoline. Carry your child as you walk: Parents should carry their infant children whenever possible. This rhythmic activity will be an integral part of the process for growing your child's well-tuned timing circuits. Rocking: You child needs rhythmic movements to build well-functioning timing circuits. Rocking provides a wonderful, natural rhythmic movement for that development. Rocking can be standing or sitting where we hold the child to our body and rock our body to provide rhythmic movement. Rocking can be in a rocking chair. Jiggling: We use the term 'Jiggling' to talk about the rhythmic movements we use with infants in our arms. This might be up and down or side to side. You already know that jiggling helps to calm infants. Each infant has his/her own favorite form of jiggling. Jiggling should be done as often as possible, not only to calm the infant. Jiggling helps to build appropriate timing and rhythmicity circuits. Pre-School Bouncing: Bouncing continues to be an excellent method of helping develop good timing and rhythmicity circuits. Patty cake: This game is an excellent way of teaching rhythmicity. Perform the patty cake to music or some steady beat. Most toddlers already have favorite songs that operate at a tempo they can successfully patty cake. Marching: This will help your child develop better balance in walking and standing. Using music or a steady beat, have you child copy your marching behaviors. To start with the youngest toddlers, hold their hands while they stand on your feet. Then, you do the marching. This helps your child's brain get the benefit of the marching before they are able to do it. Dancing: This is similar to marching. Using music, have your child move around to the beat of the music. Their hands and feet should be keeping the beat. Guide your child in this exercise so that they follow your movements keeping the beat. Tapping: Teach your child how to keep the beat with music. In this case let your child use a drum, tambourine, hand clapping, or even a cooking pot with a wooden spoon. If you child has not yet developed the ability to keep the beat, you can (should) help. When you are helping you child in any of these exercises, make sure your child's body performs the exercise to the beat, even if you are doing the work. Before starting school: Before starting school, children should be able to skip, dribble a ball, play hopscotch, throw a ball and catch a ball. If your children cannot play these games or do these activities, they probably already have timing problems which are going to interfere with their ongoing developmental process. School Aged By the time your child gets to elementary school, your child needs good timing circuits. If not, you child will suffer in a variety of ways. Usually the problems will be forms of developmental difficulties and the problems can range from mild to severe. The most common problems seem to be ADHD and Dyslexia. When your school-aged children have these problems, they need to perform a variety of rhythmic exercises daily. The exercises can be the ones listed for infant and pre-school children. You can also add the following: Jump-rope, jacks, hula-hoop, and pogo stick jumping. It is important
that children with
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