Young children love music! They love to listen to it, they love to move to it, and they love to participate in making it. As a music educator, specializing in early childhood music education, I have delighted in watching the power of music work through young children for over twenty years and it never ceases to amaze me just how powerful it can be.
Giving our young children the gift of high-quality, developmentally appropriate music is one of the best things we can do to support their brain development, early literacy skills, mathematical thinking, language and communication, and social-emotional skills, as well as train their brain for resilience, grit, and self-regulation.
Giving our children opportunities for musical play is not just something cute and fun. It is a powerful tool that gives their brain a super boost and supports all other learning and development. I think of it like giving them a super nutritious smoothie for their brain, with lots of fruits and veggies in it or like a really great brain workout that uses almost every region of their brain, making it stronger and more flexible.
And yes, because our children are adorable, it can also be extremely cute and very fun.
How can you start building musical play into your daily routine with your young kiddos to support their brain development? Here are four of my trusted, go-to ways to enjoy music with young children that I have used in my classroom, included in My Music Starts Here, demonstrated on our YouTube channel, and most importantly, used with my own children at home.
#1: Sing, sing, and sing some more!
Singing songs that your child can sing with you and making up your own songs together for simple household tasks is a simple way to start including musical play as a daily habit. What were some of your favorite songs as a child? Sing those to your child every day and soon they will start singing with you and requesting that you sing them again and again. Songs like Star Light, Star Bright, Down by the Bay, 5 Little Speckled Frogs, and The Itsy Bitsy Spider are a great place to start!
Make up silly songs for daily tasks like emptying the dishwasher, washing hands, getting safely in the car, and putting on shoes (or if your house is like mine, singing a song while trying to find the shoes and then a different song for putting them on!). The sillier the song, the better! If you and your child are laughing and singing together, all the feel-good chemicals are being released in your bodies, bonding you together, lowering your stress, and putting you both in a good mood. Need some song inspiration? You can find a collection of songs to sing here!
And don’t forget to include songs as an important piece of your child’s bedtime routine. Songs like You are my Sunshine and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star are wonderful lullabies. Did you have a favorite lullaby as a child? Share that with your little one and savor the precious moment of bonding and connecting across generations at the end of a long day.
#2: Keep a steady beat together!
The research around giving children the opportunity to keep a steady beat to music and the ease at which they learn to read is astounding! The two seemingly unrelated skills call on overlapping neural mechanisms, meaning that when children practice keeping a steady beat to music, they are strengthening the parts of their brain they will use when they start learning to read. Amazing!
Find some great recorded music – here’s one of our Spotify playlists to get you started – and keep the beat together! Pat your laps or the floor, use a pair of rhythm sticks or egg shakers, or just scoop up your little one and bounce to the beat. Anything that helps your child move in sync with the beat of the music will have a positive impact and will be lots of fun to do together.
#3: Move to music together!
Whether you are having a spontaneous dance party to some of your favorite music or singing and doing the motions for Alice the Camel, you are sharing an engaging, fun, musical moment with your child.
If you’re dancing around the kitchen together after dinner, you are creating a family culture around play – laughing, connection, and being vulnerable together. To make it more of a steady beat game, play Freeze Dance like Tevin Davis and I do in this YouTube video!
And if you are singing and moving to a song like Alice the Camel or Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes you are taking that musical play time to a whole new level for brain development as these songs not only require children to sing the melody and the lyrics, but also involve fine and gross motor skills, patterns, memorization, and sequence organization. What a brain workout! If you need some inspiration, check out our Let’s Get Up and Move! collection.
#4: Listen to music together!
One of my favorite ways to engage young children with music is Active Listening. Find a piece of music that you love on our Active Listening playlist or any other piece of music that tells a story (without lyrics), and listen to it with your child. As you listen together, ask them to imagine what story is being told through the music. Then, listen to it a second time and ask them to narrate the story as the music plays. Are dinosaurs stomping through the forest? Are fairies flying from tree to tree, escaping an evil gnome? Listen to all the great descriptive vocabulary they use!
For younger children, have them move to the music and “show” you what they hear. Either way, you will be amazed by their creativity, imagination, and self-expression!
I hope you will start trying these this week! And always remember, regardless of how you think you sound when you sing or what you look like when you dance, when we share music with our children, we are opening our hearts to them. We are letting them know that we love them and giving them something that boosts their brain development. Is there anything better than that?
Mary Anderson is the founder of My Music Starts Here.
This multi-platform music learning resource for young children and the adults who love them aims to give all children the opportunity to learn and grow through the power of music. Mary is a Richmond native, proud VCU graduate, and currently lives in Charlottesville with her husband, two children, and their very mischievous goldendoodle.
