Features of a specially designed song cycle
– Simple texts with words frequently used in everyday speech,
– In the lyrics of the songs there are a lot of imitations, interjections, short words with visible articulation, which are easy to repeat even to a child who does not speak.
⁃ The lyrics of the songs contain many verbs.
⁃ Each song is a little story which even a child at the initial stage of speech development can retell with the help of emotional vocalizations, gestures, and facial expressions.
⁃ Songs have a wide range of melody. Although the range of a child’s singing voice is small, melodies with a wide range are used in teaching so that the child can hear the difference in sound. With underdeveloped auditory perception, neighboring notes are perceived by the child as identical. Wide-range melodies allow the child to hear and understand differences in pitch.
⁃ The cycle includes songs with contrasting characters. This helps to demonstrate to the child the concepts of good-evil, fast-slow, loud-silent, sad-happy, gloomy-light….
⁃ Listening to and singing songs with acoustic accompaniment (guitar) helps to develop interference-resistant speech perception. Any musical accompaniment to singing is a hindrance to the perception of melody, rhythm, lyrics and other characteristics of songs. Modern arrangements of songs are very “noisy” (using many instruments, including percussion) and do not allow people with CI to distinguish the voice of the person singing from the stream of sounds. A combination of listening and singing practice with a teacher without accompaniment and with acoustic accompaniment helps the child/adult with a CI to learn to distinguish the teacher’s voice from the musical background.
⁃ Each song of the cycles serves to solve certain correctional tasks: development of the ability to distinguish voices by pitch and loudness, to track these changes in connected speech, expansion of the range of one’s own voice in pitch and loudness, change of timbre coloring of the voice, change of the pace of speech, development of emotional intelligence, formation of retelling skills, development of pronunciation of separate speech sounds and switching of articulation from one sound to another, etc.
⁃ The songs of the cycle are suitable for working on the development of auditory perception and speech of children and adults of different ages.
Features of the songs performance by the teacher
While singing, the teacher uses simple pictorial gestures (hand movements) that show the direction of voice pitch change, as well as depicting the characters in the song and the actions taking place in the song.
The teacher sings with expressive facial expressions and exaggerated articulation, which attracts and holds attention to the teacher’s face and stimulates the child to imitate his articulation movements and facial expressions.
The videos of the teacher singing for independent lessons at home show a close-up of the teacher’s face with expressive facial expressions and articulation, and the teacher’s hand movements that accompanied the singing of the song in the class are visible.