Movement is essential to all dimensions of learning. It is easy to confuse movement for learning with movement for music learning. And, it is easy to assume that any movement that accompanies music is musical movement.
Children love being bunnies and butterflies, but the words and images actually get in the way of the musical imagination. They put the thinking mind at the forefront rather than the musical mind. We are all familiar with the vase/face figure and ground illusion in which we look at the figure one way and see a face, and look at it another and see a vase. Both the vase and the face are present, but our perception of the figure depends upon what we see as the foreground. Similarly, the thinking mind and the musical mind may both be present, but the one in the foreground dominates the activity.
Language, which speaks to the thinking mind, is paramount in the life of young children and necessarily puts the thinking mind in charge. Words and images may effectively stimulate movement like bunnies and butterflies to serve other kinds of learning, or to contrast weighted movement with flowing movement, but they do not serve music learning.
The irony is that both weighted movement and flowing movement are essential to music learning. That movement, however, has to be triggered by the music itself, or by your non-verbal model of movement with music. It might even look like butterflies, but with the musical mind in charge.
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