By Heather Denniss [email protected]
Published in The Toledo Blade, September 14, 2022
What kind of fish live in the Great Lakes?
That was one of the questions Risa Cohen posed to the 11 children — toddlers to 6-year-olds — and 11 adults in a room at the National Museum of the Great Lakes.
Sharks. Squid. Octopus.
She shook her head slowly. No, those fish live in the ocean.
But!
The Great Lakes flow into the ocean, so all three were acceptable answers.
The children and the adults who accompanied them spent a half-hour singing and rhyming while swaying and wriggling to Cohen and her guitar during Captain Scupper’s Songfest: Maritime Music and Movement at the National Museum of the Great Lakes on Front Street.
Cohen, the creative director of Sing into Reading, hosts the event on the third Monday of the month at the museum. The next session is Monday at 10:30 a.m.
It’s a new program that expands the museum’s educational opportunities for children, says Kate Fineske, the senior director of institutional advancement at the National Museum of the Great Lakes.
“We’ve a lot of programs that connect people, especially with adults, with lots of adult learning opportunities. And we have a few small programs that we started to do with kids in schools and the community,” Fineske said. “We wanted to bring some programs to the museum specifically to focus and engage that 0 to 5, 0 to 6 age group because we really haven’t really targeted that before.”
Fineske said music has always been important to her: Her college coursework included a concentration in music; she’s an upright string bass player with the jazz band at the University of Toledo, and she tried to instill a love of music in her three children. So she turned to Risa Cohen, whom she met at the Mothers Center of Greater Toledo, and struck up a conversation.
That conversation was interrupted, like so many other things, by the coronavirus pandemic. But they picked up the thread recently and formed the program.
To an observer, it looks as if the kids — and the adults in the room — have found a fun way to pass the time. They are making rhymes, singing about a fish waking up and brushing its teeth, sharks in the Great Lakes, and a looming adventure with a Great Lakes pirate with bubble gum to fill my tum.
Adults are encouraged to get down on the floor and pretend to sleep and then get up again and spin and twirl.
And then there’s the best activity of all, when the child and adult partners lock eyes with each other. That’s when the observer can detect that unmistakable bond between child and parent — or grandparent or caregiver.
Behind the words and music and the love there are other things happening, things that might not be seen in an instant: the beginning stages of learning literacy skills.
Cohen started her life as a performer, singing, acting, dancing. But she soon realized that she wasn’t a performer.
“I’m a literacy teacher in disguise,” she said.
She went back to school and graduated with a master’s in early childhood education from Bank Street College in New York. She immersed herself in literacy workshops while she taught kindergarten.
“One of my favorite things about teaching that age, kindergarten and first grade, is seeing them read and write,” Cohen said. “It’s so magical.”
So the woman who dreamed about being a performer combined what she knew about reading and writing and set it to music.
“I’m a singer songwriter, so we started doing a lot of music, we always did a lot of music,” Cohen said.
And, she said, they did have fun. But their literacy skills improved, so much so that parents wanted to know what she did.
“I told them we sing and dance every day,” Cohen said.
But there’s a method to her music.
Literacy is not about teaching mouths to form words or fingers to draw letters, or to follow the rules of grammar.
“Literacy is communication, reading and writing, it’s about communicating, it’s about expressive and receptive language,” she said. “So it really starts with talking and listening. Talking is like writing, it’s expressive language, it’s getting a message across.
“Listening is like reading. It’s receptive language. It’s understanding someone’s message to us.”
Children love singing and dancing because they’re having fun. But singing and dancing, Cohen says, are the pathways to literacy.
She gets them dancing because “moving the body wakes up the brain,” she said. “There are specific movements I do in my work that address fine motor skills and gross motor skills.”
In child development, she said, the imaginary line that goes down the middle of the body and separates the right side and left line is called the midline. Anytime you’re moving the left side of your body, the right hemisphere of the brain is in control. Anytime you’re moving the right side of your body, the left hemisphere of the brain is in control.
“So anytime you cross that midline, you’re teaching the right and left hemispheres of the brain to communicate with each other, which is essential for literacy because reading and writing involve crossing the midline, moving from the left side of the page to the right,” she said.
Students who lose their place in the middle of a page might be having trouble crossing the midline, she said. Also, students who have trouble finding a dominant hand, for instance, writing on the left side of the page with one and the right side of the page with the other, might be having the same problem.
So the dances they do not only wakes up the brain but cross the midline.
“I also do a lot of fingerplays, which ready the hands for writing and directly benefit fine motor skills,” she said. “I try to encourage finding fingers, having finger control, and finger dexterity.”
The singing she encourages in the classroom isn’t just for listening pleasure.
“Singing engages the listener; it piques their interest, and the cadence of the melody offers variations that allow different entry points for a listener and engages the listener in a way that speaking doesn’t always,” she said. “By singing to a child you’re better able to get their message across to them.”
A good example, she said, is singing a lullaby to a baby to get them to sleep, a far more effective method than simply telling them to do so, Cohen said.
Or, perhaps getting in a circle with an adult loved one, and going out on a journey on the Great Lakes with Captain Scupper and Risa Cohen.
Contact Heather Denniss at: [email protected].
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