art and activities
MUSIC
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Social-emotional skills:
Music, because it is so often shared with others in singing, dancing, and playing instruments together, is by its very nature a social experience. Music activities with infants and toddlers offer them many opportunities to:
Learn and practice self-regulation: The experience of being soothed also helps babies learn to soothe themselves. (The big sea star)
Understand emotions: Singing about feelings helps babies and toddlers learn the words to describe their emotional experiences (“If you’re happy and you know it…”).
Cooperate and build relationships: Music is often a team effort, with each participant adding their sound or voice. Music experiences, in which children use their own voices or play instruments, are especially good choices for very young children. Because music activities typically do not require sharing—a skill most toddlers are still working on they encourage positive peer interactions and can form the basis of toddlers’ first friendships.
Experience self-esteem, self-confidence, and self efficacy: Babies and young toddlers develop a sense that they are smart and competent when they can make an impact on their world. Think of a baby’s huge toothless grin when she makes a rattle go chicka chicka or a toddler’s careful attention as he taps on a xylophone to hear it chime.
Share and take turns: Music very naturally encourages turn taking. Picture babies passing instruments back and forth to a teacher or toddlers taking turns with the classroom’s toy drums.
Develop cultural awareness: Playing songs and using musical styles from children’s home cultures create continuity between home and the caregiving setting. This nurtures children’s feelings of safety and security and validates the importance of their culture and language, like Jiya singing singappeney song in nursery.
Physical (motor) skills-
Be it the muscles in the lips used to form words in a melody, the small muscles of the hands used to hold a drumstick or whistle, or the large muscles in the legs and arms as children dance, music is a physical activity. It supports:
Gross motor development: dancing to music
Fine motor development: Finger plays like Open, Shut Them and interactive songs like “The Wheels on the Bus” (among many others) are perfect examples of ways music can support the development of small muscles in children’s hands and fingers—the same muscles they will use for writing and drawing when they are older.
Balance: In moving one’s body to music, children can stand while swaying or shifting their weight from one foot (or side of the body) to the other—which means they can balance.
Body awareness: Moving different parts of a baby’s body and encouraging toddlers to move their own bodies as you sing a song—for example, “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”—helps them learn that these body parts do, indeed, belong to them.
Bilateral coordination or crossing the midline: Bilateral coordination is the ability to use both sides of the body together, like playing a piano. This skill requires both sides of the brain to communicate to coordinate the body’s movements. Crossing the midline (when a child uses one part of the body in the space of the other part) is an activity that requires good bilateral communication. Picture a child playing a drum with both hands, or dancing Jiya’s fav Hokey Pokey.
Mental Cognitive skills:
Counting. Many songs introduce numbers and counting: “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,” “Five Little Monkeys,” “This Old Man,” and “The Ants are marching Two by Two” are just a few examples. The rhythm and repetition of songs may make it easier for very young children to remember the number
Patterns and sequence: Learning to anticipate patterns and place objects or events in sequence builds critical early math and early reading skills. Choose songs that are repetitive in rhythm or lyrics to help children learn to anticipate patterns classic example old McDonald
Steady beat: Being aware of the steady beat involves clapping or patting out the beat to a piece of music or a nursery rhyme.
Memory: Music holds a powerful place in our memory. Even babies as young as 8 months have shown recognition of a familiar piece of music after a two-week delay.
Discrimination or observation of differences: Through experience with different instruments and types of music, children slowly become aware of differences in pitch, timbre, tone, and volume. Even young babies will look surprised when one egg shaker makes a different sound from all the others.
Pretend play and symbolic thinking: Learning that one object (a block) can represent another object (a car) is a major leap in children’s thinking skills.
Language and literacy skills-
Spoken language: Music gives children an easy-to-enter window into practicing language and deciphering meaning.
Dual language learning: Offering music experiences in children’s home language supports dual language development in the first three years and beyond. Music also is a great means to involve families in the program as they share their culture’s songs and rhymes.
Receptive language: Listening to music is an exercise in receptive language skills (words that children understand but may not yet be able to say). But remember, music need not have words to communicate feelings or images.
Phonemic awareness: Phonemic awareness describes how well a child can hear, recognize, and use different sounds (called phonemes). For example, in the word cat there are three different phonemes: the /k/ sound, the short /a/ sound, and the /t/ sound. Children who are able to distinguish different sounds and phonemes are more likely to develop stronger literacy skills over time. For example, in the song “I’m a Little Teapot,” the words stout, spout, shout, and out all rhyme.
As Dumbledore says “music! a magic beyond all we do here".