Sing, Play, Learn with MacPhail®: My Auntie Anna Plays the Piano
Sarah Hruska Olson, a busy MacPhail teaching artist working with Sing Play Learn with MacPhail®, MacPhail Music for Life™, and School Partnerships, presents one of her favorite go to activities for babies and children. Sarah learned this activity from clinician Aimee Curtis Pfizner at the American Orff-Schulwerk Association (AOSA) conference. Older children will love clapping out the beat and seeing how far they can take their splits. With babies, you can use this as a lap exercise, using your hands to gently move their feet. For any age, this activity promotes steady beat, tempo changes, and hand/eye coordination. Learn with her as she teaches a folk rhyme from Australia, My Auntie Anna Plays the Piano.
For Sarah Hruska Olson, her earliest experience working in an early childhood setting was volunteering in her mom’s Head Start classroom when she was in middle school. Following in her mother’s footsteps, Sarah has been in the Sing Play Learn with MacPhail® program at MacPhail more than 14 years, having taught every class Sing Play Learn with MacPhail® offers, as well as in two of the school partnership programs. She helped to create and revise curriculum for all the classes and wrote the original curriculum for Family Music class, and served as the curriculum coordinator at MacPhail.