Stop, Look & Listen
Guitar - Sheet Music

Guitar - beginner

SKU: KJ.WE8

Composed by Ginger Clarkson. Elementary text. General Music. Music book. Neil A. Kjos Music Company #WE8. Published by Neil A. Kjos Music Company (KJ.WE8).

ISBN 9780849759246.

STOP, LOOK & LISTEN contains a series of songs and activities designed to assist special edu­cation and primary level classroom and music teachers in helping children increase their aware­ness of themselves and the world in which they live. Since children tend to enjoy music and to memorize melodies and lyrics quickly, these songs can be an invaluable teaching aide. The musical activities fos­ter such cognitive skills as the identification of proper names, body parts, days of the week, and spatial directions; they encourage students to under­stand the world through their senses, and they pro­mote basic social skills such as sharing and taking turns.

The songs are easy to learn; they are brief and contain simple, repeated words and phrases. The rhythmic stress adheres to natural speech rhythms, and the melodies stay within a comfortable singing range. The lyrics refer to everyday concepts and basic motor activities. Predictable, traditional har­monies are replaced by carefully employed disso­nances which have an awakening effect on the lis­tener. Each activity entails some form of class par­ticipation - verbal, motoric or instrumental. The levels assigned to each song - preprimary, primary and intermediate - do not correspond to grade levels, but indicate relative levels of concep­tual and technical difficulty within this series of songs. The preprimary and primary songs are ap­propriate for normal preschoolers and kindergarten­ers, whereas the intermediate songs are suitable for older children in day camp or school settings. All of the levels can be useful in motivating young mainstreamed children who may need extra instruc­tion in order to keep up with their classmates. By repeating the lyrics, students learn to develop one­word utterances into full sentences, and isolated motoric responses into movement sequences. Each song includes a piano score and guitar/au­toharp chord symbols and is followed by specific Teaching Objectives and Teaching Procedures. In­structors may prefer to tape the musical accompan­iments in order to keep hands free for cuing or dis­ciplining. (The tape recorder, of course, can be switched off to accommodate children who forget re­sponses or make mistakes.) When accompanying these songs on the piano, it is important not to blur the sound with the pedal. The notes should be crisp and clear. Rhythms can be adapted as necessary to accommodate alternate lyrics (such as different names, body parts, numbers, etc.). When using Stop, Look & Listen, teachers can set high stan­dards for their students; the goal of these activities, however, is not to achieve perfect musical perfor­mance, but to create enjoyable learning experi­ences.