Music and Preschoolers: Learning Through Play

“Talk to your baby-bump” and “Play your favorite songs during pregnancy” are common pieces of advice expectant mothers often receive. It turns out that they are also tested valuable parenting tips, especially for preschool-age children.

Although such tips might sound like jokes, numerous recent studies have confirmed that babies in the womb like listening to certain sounds, and when exposed to them, they significantly calm down. Research has also proven that an unborn baby has the ability to recognize and respond to its mother’s heartbeat, and the pattern of her breathing. After birth, newborns start to notice and listen more attentively to their parents’ humming and to the music played by their crib mobiles. After a few months, babies begin to feel attracted to sounds of nature, such as the pitter-patter of the rain, chirping birds, and rustling leaves. The most important question though is how can we use music to develop preschoolers’ mental, physical, social, and linguistic skills?

Most parents notice that music helps promote their children’s cognitive development. Their observation is correct, and it goes in line with what musicians and pedagogists say. They believe that it stimulates children’s imagination, creativity, and self-expression.

One of the things that almost every child enjoys doing in the nursery is learning new songs and dance choreography. Such a simple activity enhances the child’s audio-motor coordination, a principal skill we aim to sharpen here at Little Academy, by incorporating learning-through-music activities in our daily programs.

Music is also useful in the cases of screaming and hyperactive children as it helps them relieve their anxiety and stress as the interaction with songs and rhymes helps children express their emotions in a healthy way.

Linguistically and academically speaking, nursery songs promote literacy and improve enunciation skills because of the repetitive rhythmic patterns which appeal to the ears of children. Needless to say, rhymes and songs facilitate children’s vocabulary compilation, for they enable children to pick up the names of shapes, colors, number, etc in more than one language. The secret lies in beats which make the learning process easy and fun.

At Little Academy, music is given a priority in our programs because your child’s sense of creativity is one of our top concerns. Our goal is to be an effective factor in creating successful children.