My Son Makes Up an "African" Song

Here's a continuation of what I talked about in one of my earlier posts - learning through observation . Alaijah said that he learned this song at one of my Congolese dance classes a month ago.

I never heard him sing anything like this before and then one evening it just came out of him.

Learning Through Observation

I took my 4 year old son Alaijah to one of the dance workshops I mentioned last post and I was so disappointed that he didn't participate in either the drumming or dancing. He has been playing music and dancing at home since he had the motor skills to do it and the the teacher had personally come up to him and encouraged him to do either or both. I couldn't figure out why he would just sit there with his mouth agape the entire time. That was until a couple nights after when he suddenly got in the mood to recreate what he had seen at the classes. It was then that I realized that he was observing and absorbing everything he saw that day.


It reminded me that we don't learn exclusively by action. Our minds can process what we see and then our bodies can execute it later on after what we have learned has really "sunken in" .


Alaijah did just that in these two clips. In one he spontaneously used shakers as drumsticks to imitate the wrist-shakers (forgot the real name for them) the drummers wear. In the next clip he demonstrates his Congolese hip movements.