Gesture Games for Autumn and Winter: Hand Gesture, Song and Movement Games for Children in Kindergarten and the Lower Grades - Softcover

A second volume of Wilma Ellersiek's wonderful seasonal gesture games, fingerplays, and songs in the mood of the fifth. This collection completes the cycle of games for the course of the year, following on from 'Gesture Games for Spring and Summer'. Dramatic changes in nature take place in the fall, as the summer's fruit matures and is ready for harvest, the trees change their color and the first frost touches plants and flowers around us. In the moving and touching games of this book we can experience the blowing of the autumn wind, the fog hanging in the air and the earth getting ready for winter. The companion CD (sold separately) also includes songs from the Spring and Summer book.

Wilma Ellersiek, born in 1921, was a teacher of music, movement and speech at the Stuttgart Music Academy, as well as a stage director of opera and drama. Her research into the effects of rhythm, movement and language on the young child led to the development of the first gesture games. After she retired from the Academy, she created many more of these games, which are interconnected play-units woven of rhyme, rhythm and music. Kundry Willwerth was a Waldorf kindergarten teacher for over 30 years. For the last 20 years she has devoted herself, together with her husband Lyn, to translating Wilma Ellersiek's books, playing the games with children in her care and presenting workshops throughout North America and internationally. She is also the founder and artistic director of Magic Garden Puppets, a marionette theatre company in central New York state.