From the website MusicStaff.com:

"Orff Schulwerk is an approach to music education that includes all facets of music expression. Children learn in an active way, where imitation and exploration lead to improvisation and music literacy. Speech, song, movement and instruments are the vehicles used to teach rhythm, melody, form, harmony and timbre. It is built on the idea that a child must be able to feel and make rhythms and melodies before being called on to read and write music. In the same way a child learns to speak before learning to read and write, he or she must have a musical language in which to feel at home before technical knowledge is introduced. The Orff Process, is child-developmental. Orff believed that a child internalized and developed ownership of a concept by experiencing the concept first. "Experience first, intellectualize second." (or put the experience in words after the whole body has experienced the concept)"