Children naturally enjoy moving, making sounds, and using their bodies to describe things that intrigue them (fire engines, thunderstorms, a barking dog). Through sixty carefully structured activities, Making Connections shows you how to use that natural enjoyment as a foundation for developing children’s language and literacy skills.

In each activity, children purposefully move to voice or music, experiencing abstract language concepts concretely, through their own bodies. Some activities link movement and singing: In “Singing About the Seasons,” children choose movements to represent seasonal happenings (such as shoveling snow) and then use those movements to create new verses to a familiar song.

Other activities link movement and chants, sounds, or individual words. For example, in “Ending Punctuation,” children choose a movement to accompany the words “period” or “question mark.” Then they use words and movements to punctuate simple sentences written on large strips of paper.

Includes a CD of 28 songs used in the book.