Get your little one acclimated to attending school by participating in a consistent class routine that's rich with play and learning. School should be fun and feel safe, so why not introduce your child to what it means to be a part of a classroom community with the help of someone your child already knows well-- YOU or another caregiver? A well-established bond between child and caregiver will encourage exploration and experimentation and lay a solid foundation for attending school without a primary caregiver. Transitions are hard. Let Music Together of Decatur help ease the daily transitions at home (by giving you the tools to make them musical) and the upcoming transitions (by getting your child ready for school).
There are a zillion reasons to make music together-- not the least of which is for the sheer joy of singing and dancing with your little one and building a community for both you and your child. The benefits listed below are not meant to be a comprehensive list of the perks of making music together but rather a small sampling of what we mean when we say Music Learning Supports All Learning®.
Language Development:
By playing with the individual sounds in words (the building blocks of speech referred to as “phonemes”), we give young children deep exposure to a rich variety of phonemes and help build “phonemic awareness”. According to research, a child’s early phonemic awareness is correlated with later reading success. And, because music is accessible and enjoyable for young children, they are likely to enjoy hearing and singing songs over and over (and over), especially when the grownups they love sing with them. At the same time, they're also practicing active listening skills, which are integral to language development. Phonemic awareness is one of the great benefits of musical play.
Social-Emotional Development:
Group music-making provides a fun and natural way to support positive social interactions among children, an important ingredient in the development of empathy and compassion. By singing together, dancing together, and playing instruments together, we are supporting children’s musical development along with their social/emotional development. In fact, research has found that preschoolers who engaged in participatory group music and movement activities showed greater group cohesion, cooperation, and prosocial behavior when compared to children who did not engage in the same music activities. Among other things, singing and dancing together lead to increased empathy. [Evolution and Human Behavior, Kirschner and Tomasello]
Cognitive Development:
Executive functioning is a set of cognitive processes that help people control their behavior and achieve goals. Inhibitory control is a key executive function that your child is working hard to master at their young age: They'll need to wait their turn, learn to engage in "I speak, you speak" conversations, wait patiently for something they are expecting or looking forward to, and think before reacting. And music class is an EXCELLENT place to practice some of these skills with them! How do we provide playful opportunities to practice these skills? Here are a few examples:
- We move quickly and freeze;
- We take turns singing with call-and-response style phrase play;
- We play and stop while shaking, tapping, or drumming instruments;
- We practice leaving words or phrases out of songs while hearing them only in our heads.
Physical Development:
Many Music Together songs give children the opportunity for fingerplay-- making small movements with their fingers and hands as they make music. These activities exercise the small muscles in the hands and coordinate the hands and eyes to help build important fine motor skills. We extend that movement exploration to other parts of the body and spend time exploring movement with our whole body. In doing so, we’re helping exercise and develop a child’s gross motor muscles, strengthening their coordination and balance.
We also spend time crossing the midline of our bodies during class. The midline refers to an imaginary line running from our brain to our feet, separating the body's left side from its right side. The ability to move one hand, foot, or eye into the space of the other hand, foot, or eye is important for a child's developing "bilateral coordination," or the ability to use both sides of the brain and both sides of the body. This coordination is necessary for the development of various motor and cognitive skills, such as reading, writing, and self-care (think buttoning, tying shoelaces, etc.).
Our early childhood music curriculum has decades of research behind it, in both music education and child development. We know what we're talking about, and we're good at what we do! And because we recognize that children learn through play, we make everything we do in class engaging and fun.
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Call / Text: 678-466-0737
