Miss Mary's Music Notes

Children Learn through Scaffolding

All children require help at times when trying something new or engaging in a task that is a little more difficult than usual. You can help your child master a new skill by scaffolding your child’s learning.

Just as a physical scaffold gives temporary support to workers building a skyscraper, so does educational scaffolding provide the social, cognitive, and emotional support required for your child to reach further in building his knowledge and understanding of the world.

Scaffolding is an interactive means of learning that occurs between adult and child. In this process the adult gently guides and supports the child’s learning, responding to the child’s level of participation by asking questions, making observations, and issuing new challenges according to the child’s responses. Together, one layer at a time, the adult and child discover new ideas, experience new emotions, learn new language, and strengthen their trusting bond.

Steps to Scaffolding

As a parent, you have probably used the process of scaffolding without even realizing it while helping your child do something that he couldn’t have done on his own. You have used scaffolding when you have helped your child put a puzzle together by asking questions, making suggestions, and giving hints. You may have noticed that the next time your child put that puzzle together, he needed less help. Through scaffolding, skills are mastered.

The scaffolding concept crosses into every area of life. Interestingly, in a study first published in 2008 entitled “Preschool teachers’ use of music to scaffold children’s learning and behavior” by authors Catherine Wilson Gillespie and Kendra R. Glider, it was shown that all teachers in the study used music most frequently to scaffold children’s learning, both in academic and social skill areas, and second most frequently to scaffold routine activities such as cleaning up and transitions to new activities.

More Scaffolding Ideas

In Kindermusik class, scaffolding occurs all the time as you and your child play with instruments, props, your voices, and movement and discover ways to adapt activities to your style and your child’s interests and abilities.  Sounds interesting?  Why not find out for yourself!  Come join Kindermusik with Mary for a free preview class and see why 99% of Kindermusik parents would recommend the program to other parents.

Enrollment for Spring Kindermusik classes at Borchard Community Center is going on now at www.crpd.org  For full schedule and class details, visit

www.kindermusikwithmary.net