Children love engaging with music and movement in their early years as it helps them to better express their feelings and emotions, and work in groups while developing their self-confidence and imagination. Hence, many early childhood educators and preschools like MindChamps incorporate music and movement into their early childhood syllabus to add colour and fullness to a child’s daily learning experience.
Music and movement provide children with many benefits – they help children develop skills such as literacy, cognitive growth, problem-solving, self-expression, social skills and many more. A child’s learning is incomplete without music and movement in their early childhood years. This blog will highlight the benefits of music classes for children as well as explore the various ways that music is integrated into our curriculum at MindChamps Preschool.
Why Is Music And Movement Important In Child Development?
In a 2016 study conducted by the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute, results have shown that musical experiences in childhood accelerate brain development, especially in language acquisition and reading skills. Additionally, learning how to play an instrument also improves mathematical learning and increases exam scores.
However, academic achievement is not the only benefit of music education and exposure. Music and movement classes for preschools also ignite areas of child development and skills for school readiness, helping the body and mind work together.
Children learn best through play, imitation and exploration – music and movement combine all these. Within early childhood education and preschool settings, music classes for children use a range of sensory modalities like vision, hearing, and movement to support learning in a more fun and engaging way.
Music and movement enable children to pick up new words and concepts through the chanting of rhymes, as well as singing songs to learn numbers and alphabets. Furthermore, many music and movement classes involve group learning, giving children an opportunity to enhance their social skills, practise taking turns and learn how to cooperate with others. These activities also help children express emotions and communicate through their actions.
For instance, many toddlers love dancing and moving to music. The key to music for toddlers is repetition, as it encourages language development while triggering memorisation skills within our little ones. Children can also reproduce rhythms by clapping or tapping objects.
On the other hand, as children progress into preschool, they are not as self-conscious about their abilities. Instead, they are more eager to let their voices soar. Children at this age love repeating words and melodies, as well as using rhythms with a definitive beat. Thus, music classes for preschool children usually focus on familiar things they like — toys, animals, play activities, and people. They also enjoy fingerplays and rhymes, with or without musical accompaniment.
Tips To Create Music And Movement Activities For Your Preschooler At Home
In addition to music and movement classes in preschool, parents can also create music activities at home for their children. Some of these activities can include:
- Building a musical instrument with simple materials at home. An example would be creating a mini guitar using an empty tissue box and rubber bands. Not only does this fuel your child’s love for music, but it also stimulates their imagination, encouraging them to think outside the box.
- Make music in the background. Involve your child’s senses with different musical instruments such as a keyboard or toy xylophone to stimulate their auditory and tactile senses.
- Put some of their favourite music on and teach them simple dance steps to improve their cognitive skills such as coordination, balance and rhythm.
- Select different types of music to improve your child’s concentration and encourage memory skills as they try to recall the lyrics of their favourite nursery rhymes.
When you encourage your child to clap their hands in the rhythm of music or when they jump up and down, you are also helping them learn about music – this early introduction to music helps build a foundation and develop essential skills for starting school.
Nurturing The Genius In Every Child With Music
From listening to soothing sounds as babies to learning rhythmic harmonies and gaining new language as well as social skills, there is no downside to bringing children and music together. At MindChamps Preschool, we believe that music can enliven and enrich the lives of each child in our classroom. As such, we aim to introduce our breakthrough, patent-pending MindChamps Music™ programme across all our Preschool Centres by the end of 2022.
Based on over four decades of research and innovative music teaching, our revolutionary music programme stimulates every area of your child’s brain to integrate music, literacy, numeracy as well as social and emotional development – all to nurture the genius in them. In turn, allowing every child to reach their full potential.
Book a visit to any of our preschools in Singapore to learn more about our unique pedagogy and music classes for children today!