Hi all! This is Amy from Music a la Abbott. I hope you all enjoyed the previous two posts from Karla and Kate: I love Karla's ideas for surviving the end of the school year (proud to say, I'm one week into summer vacation) and Kate's ideas for reflecting on the year and looking forward. I debated many different things to blog about today. Some of my ideas were on pacing, transitions, engagement rates, scaffolding but like I said, I'm on summer vacation! So, I decided to focus on something fun: Hand clapping games.
Before I share a few of my favorite hand clapping games, let's talk about why hand clapping games are important. We know that hand clapping games are important for their musical purposes but also for all their non-musical reasons as well. Hand clapping games have been researched and proven to help with motor skills and motor planning, crossing the mid line, bilateral coordination, visual tracking and socialization. {My O.T. (occupational therapists) love it when I teach the students hand clapping games because it's working their gross motor skills and that directly impacts their fine motor skills. The classroom teachers love it because they see an impact in their phonemic awareness, rhyming, and tracking skills.} Two other things that it's been confirmed to help with, and as music teachers is important to us is, sequencing & patterns and beat & rhythm.