
Junior Jive Term 1
Welcome To The Junior Jive Family
Junior Jive is the best South African music and movement programme for preschoolers – we help prepare your child for “big school” through the wonderful medium of music. We don’t only focus on music concepts and music knowledge, we also develop their gross motor and fine motor skills, as well as other perceptual skills. The cherry on top is we do all this through play and exploration and have a LOT of fun every week!
The Junior Jive programme starts for babies from 4 months old to children of 8 years old. It is educationally based and focuses its activities on the development of the different age groups. The Junior Jive classes are presented by teachers who are passionate about your child and about education.
As teachers, our responsibility is to help children discover and express their own musical talents, while developing their school readiness skills.
The School Readiness Skills We Focus On:
- Language and pre-reading skills
- Cognitive skills
- Numeracy
- Social skills
- Physical skills
- Gross motor and Fine motor skills
- Emotional and social skills

WHAT HAVE OUR LITTLE MAESTROS BEEN UP TO?
Babies & Maestros on the Move
At the beginning of the year it takes the Baby Maestros (4 months to 1 vear old) and the Maestros on the Move (walkers to 2 years) a little while to get used to our awesome Junior Jive teachers. We sing songs, play musical games and do a lot of body labelling to get them used to our class structure and help them settled. Please be patient if your little Maestro is still getting used to us – we will never force them to do something they don’t want to do!
With our younger Maestros we used action songs to name the parts of their body through the songs, ‘Clap Your Hands and Sing Along with Me’ and ‘Zippy says. Our Baby Maestros just loved wiggling their toes and blowing bubbles to the music!
Exploring our emotions has played a big role in our listening and creative activities this term. The Baby Maestros were fascinated by our facial expressions, as we explored the different emotions of happy, sad and angry.
We also repeated the “I am Happy” song whilst repeating the facial expressions that was described earlier.
Our Baby Maestros listened intently as we sang expressive and simple songs like ‘I am Happy’. Maestros on the Move started copying our actions and singing along during ‘If You’re Happy Feeling Song’ and I am special, you are special!’
Our little ones also enjoyed our percussion instrument play during our “Let’s play” activity.
DID YOU KNOW?
Playing different percussion instruments helps develop fine motor coordination and rhythm.
WHAT HAVE OUR MINI MAESTROS BEEN UP TO?
Mini Maestro's (2 years to 4 years)
Our Mini Maestro’s have settled in so well this term. They have participated with so much enthusiasm. We sang songs, played musical games and did a lot of body labelling to get them used to our class structure and help them settle. Please be patient if your Maestro is still getting used to us – we will never force them to do something they don’t want to do!
We encourage our children to get up and move to the music while developing their gross motor muscles! They especially enjoyed playing the musical game ‘Zippy Says’ as well as demonstrating how well they could ‘Copy Cat’ and ‘Tap Like Me’.
The Mini Maestros loved learning our Junior Jive version of “If you’re happy and you know it”. Here are our words to the traditional song, for you to sing with your little Maestro:
If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands if you’re excited and you know it shout Hooray!
If you’re angry and you know it let’s talk about it.
If you’re sad give yourself a hug.
Our Mini Maestros explored their emotions and we also listened to the story about the Colour Monster. We linked different colours to different feelings and we had discussions about feelings like happy, sad, angry, scared etc. We then also sang songs like “I am special!” to encourage our friends to know that everyone is special, even if we are a little bit different sometimes.
Playing different percussion instruments helps develop fine motor coordination and rhythm. Each percussion instrument has a different movement, which develops different muscles.

This term we focused on learning to play the instruments correctly, including Zulu drums and egg shakers while playing to songs like “Shake, shake your eggs” and “We play our drums together”. Our Mini Maestros also got to test out the new FAVOURITE – the stretchy band, using it to go up and down on the beat listening to the music and our teacher.
WHAT HAVE OUR MASTERS & PROS BEEN UP TO?
Master and Pro Maestro's (4 years to 8 years)
The older Maestros have enjoyed showing me how to say hello in sign language as well as learning to say hello in the different South African languages during our ‘Hello’ song! A popular song in this class is the ‘Zippy Zebra Zumba’ song where we focused on moving in time to the music. The
‘Move and Freeze’ song gave us an opportunity to practice using our listening ears as well as testing our control to stop moving when the song said freeze.
Our music focus this term has been TEMPO and we used our whole bodies moving to the fast (Presto), slow (Largo) and walking pace (Andante) music.
Adding different percussion instruments to this has made it more difficult, which the children have thoroughly enjoyed. They especially loved our song called ‘What’s It Called’ where we played the different tempos with claves and egg shakers. We have also started to work on the concepts of beat and rhythm using the song ‘Apple Tree’.
Even in our Master Maestro class we explored our feelings with our ‘I am Happy, Yes I am’ song. It is so important to speak to our children and explain the different emotions to them. It is also important to label the words that match the emotions and let the children know that it is okay to feel these emotions and to talk about it with Mommy, Daddy and your teachers.
We have practiced playing bass and tone hand positions on the Zulu drums while playing to the song ‘Goal!’ as well as learning to play the castanets different ways.
DID YOU KNOW?
We focus on the development of beat, as it is a skill needed for language development, mathimatical skills and reading!

