Share Your Thoughts

[Meredith Pizzi]

Share some thoughts about the challenges of providing multi-age groupings.

[Ericha Rupp]

Some of the challenges with providing multi-age groupings is meeting all the kids at their developmental level. I get to work with a few groups like this now and it is always a challenge to create activities that are not too hard and yet not too easy for all kiddos involved. I also find myself ‘picking and chossing my battles’ and constantly thinking “27 step ahead”. These are also my favorite groups to lead because it encourages a more challenging creative side to come out and play. 🙂

[Laura Myers]

I feel that the biggest challenge in providing mulit-age groups is making sure the group material engages all participants. I like the thoughts shared in the video on how the older kids may enjoy helping the younger kids learn. The older kids may enjoy demonstrating the actions for the songs they are familiar with, however, there needs to be something new for the older kids too. If not, it may become a bit boring for them.
I also like the thought share about trying to find songs with movement that works for all involved. This may require some altering of the moments, but it’s not anything I would have thought of until I was in a session leading movements and finding that not all could participate.

[Ian Crawford]

I think the biggest challenge is making each music experience developmentally appropriate for each child. It requires a lot of adaptation and thinking outside the box. It’s just as important to keep the older kids engaged and interested as it is to not overwhelm the younger ones. I don’t currently see any groups with more than a 1 or 1.5 year difference in age, but even within those groups there are sometimes big differences developmentally.

[Shonda Malik]

Some challenges about the varied ages would be to keep the music for the youngest participants appropriate while not boring the older kids. Ways to challenge the older kids would be to do an extra verse at the end for them to go really fast, ask for their ideas about ways to move, ways to play instruments, ways to change words. The older kids can also help the younger kids during songs such as body identification.

[Lysa Wright]

It is a challenge to keep everyone engaged. On one hand, you want to provide simple, low stimulation music for any infants that may be in the group, but in the other you need to keep it interesting enough so the older ones don’t get too antsy. And THEN you still don’t want things to be over the heads of the little ones. I like the thought of having the older ones being “helpers” for the group or encouraging them to help and show the younger ones what to do, how to play instruments, etc.

[BJ Waelz]

It is a challenge to keep multiple ages engaged at one time. I find using the older siblings as models or helpers can be a good little trick to keep them engaged with a less challenging activity. However, I do often notice that they like going back to simpler activities, or familiar old songs that they know well and may remember from past classes. The younger ones love to imitate the bigger kids. While it is important to engage the older ones, we don’t want to overwhelm the younger ones so they feel left out or withdraw. The use of movement songs allows for a wide variety of responses, instrument playing can provide this as well.

[Adrienne Salmon]

Some of the challenges that come with multi-age groupings fall mostly within the developmental age of the group as a whole, and finding productive, age-appropriate activities for the whole group to engage in. What may be age-approopriate for one child could not be appropriate for another. So the challenge comes to be, how do I adapt this activity to make it as appropriate as possible for each child involved? Within that issue, keeping the older children engaged in what may be considered ‘baby’ activities, (and on the same hand, keeping younger children engaged in more advanced activities), is another challenge inside itself. A solution may be to use older children as examples on younger activities, or having the younger children help with simpler tasks in more advanced activities.

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