Week 10/11 - Orff Learning/Cognition/Memory

 After a refreshing week off uni due to STUVAC week I and feeling very refreshed and wanted to centre this blog post about an incredible speech/article I found by Robyn Stavely called 'Orff Schulwerk and Learning' This article talks about how music makes us want to move and this is instinct built in to us. It talks about how a baby/toddler will hear music for the first time and it is the baby's natural instinct to want to react with a head bop or some form of movement. In her article she references other great pieces of work support the huge benefits of Orff.

Hearing Make's us Move:

"One only has to observe a baby’s natural inclination to bob or bounce in response to music, the engaged “light in the eye” as an action song is played and the miraculous coordination of not only clapping hands in “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” in the correct place, but for the hands to actually meet is an amazing feat of coordinated movement, spatial awareness, music cognition, temporal awareness, language representation, symbolism, auditory sequencing, auditory discrimination and so on. The child is personally engaged with the music, the movement, the people involved, the ideas, the anticipation and reasoning, the logic and imagining, the satisfaction and joy which is engendered through learning and growing in understanding." (Phillips_Silver & Trainor, 2007, p534).

The idea of this is absolutely fascinating to me as it shows how music/musical movement is incredible in brain development for a baby but it also make's our brains smarter and stronger as lots of multi tasking and multi thought process's go in to moving/responding to music. Why Orff is lots of fun is because it also incorporates  play in to learning. Play is essential in brain development at young ages as play incorporates elements of team work, socialising, rationalising, compromising, pleasure and fun. These are all essential in young brain development.





The diagram above further shows what the brain is doing/going through when engaging in Orff based activities/musical movement. 

Staveley, R., 2010. ORFF SCHULWERK AND LEARNING. ORFF SCHULWERK AND LEARNING, [online] pp.1-5. Available at: <https://www.uts.edu.au/sites/default/files/accy-rstaveley-closingspeech.pdf>.


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