All posts by Jeff Spickard

The Science of Music: How to Prepare Children to Enjoy Practicing

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The series The Neuroscience of Music*  shows parents and music teachers ways in which early childhood music education can help impact the development of children. This second set of the Wish List series focuses more specifically on a parent’s School Skills Wish List. The topic of the third installment of this set is how to get children to enjoy practicing.

From infancy to about the age of 6, children have a unique window of opportunity to learn how to, and enjoy practicing things. Dee Joy Coulter, a nationally recognized Neuroscience educator, explains that during these few years, a child’s enjoyment of repetition is strong. Parents can help them to practice naturally by providing fun activities that they can eventually master. However, this satisfaction must come from within in order to develop a lifelong habit, warns Coulter, so parents must resist praise, blame or pressure during these activities.

Below are ways that parents and early childhood music educators can use music to help children learn to develop self-discipline to succeed at school, work, athletics, and the arts.

How to introduce the idea of practicing to infants and toddlers

  • In learning basic coordination and language, infants must practice and learn the nuances of their senses in a pleasing way. They are wired to mirror everything they see, and this is highly rewarding to them. Parents and early childhood music teachers can help with imitation games with clapping and pointing to things with exaggerated facial expressions, and they will naturally follow and copy.
  • In the earliest stages of infancy to toddlerhood, parents can perform simple songs and movement games to teach motor skills and instill a familiarity. After a few weeks of repetition, leave a particular game for a few weeks and come back to it. This allows the infant or toddler time to anchor the movements and memory in their system. When the game is brought back, the predictability that goes with recognition and the control that goes with increased physical mastery are very powerful incentives for practicing.

How to teach preschoolers to begin focusing on how to practice

  • Research suggests that poor learners don’t know how to handle the failures of new learning, and so tend to abandon challenges right away for fear of failure. On the other hand, those that excel in tasks and challenges tend to have a passion for practice and truly enjoy the experience – much like the capacity of children’s minds in the first stages of life.
  • Share enjoyable music activities with your preschooler before introducing an instrument. By first instilling a love of music in children before asking them to focus on an instrument helps to ensure that they will enjoy practicing due to its relationship to something they already love.
  • The teaching practice of spiraling, or a pattern of dropping an activity for a period and then spiraling back to it, allows new skills to seat more deeply than constant practice. Childhood music programs  will use this practice along with the process of scaffolding to allow children to learn on their own and provide help at the appropriate times. This approach to creating the basis for more advanced learning is important for advancement in musical skills, mathematics, science and foreign language learning.

Music can be an important tool for preparing infants and toddlers for a lifetime of learning enjoyment. Games that encourage mimicking help to develop a love for practicing from the earliest stages of infancy. By leaving and returning back to activities, children will learn to think and accept new concepts on their own while having pleasure in practicing. This will not only serve them well in music, but also in academics.

*Musikgarten Delivers: The Neuroscience of Music collection by Dr. Dee Coulter is available for $10 in the Product Catalog section of our Teacher Portal. Username and password are required. You may also contact Musikgarten at 800-216-6864 to purchase.

The Science of Music: How Music Teaches Children to Share, Take Turns, and Speak Up

Early Childhood Music, Science of Music,

Musikgarten is proud to partner with parents by delivering a highly informative series of publications, The Neuroscience of Music.* If you missed the first series of posts on The Neuroscience of Music, explaining ways in which childhood music education can help encourage a Behavior Wish List from parents, you can find them here.

This is the first of a second set in the same series that focuses on parent’s School Skills Wish List, exploring how music can help parents and childhood music educators prepare children to share, take turns, and speak up.

Dee Joy Coulter, a nationally recognized Neuroscience educator, points to what anthropologists have discovered. With the nuclear family becoming smaller with fewer siblings, and early childhood friendships limited more to “play dates” than larger neighborhood play groups, the natural societal process has changed in how children learn to work in a social environment such as school. For generations, however, other cultures around the world have been teaching these societal skills through songs, dances, and movement games in which the entire village participated. Coulter contends that these same time-tested methods can be applied through childhood music programs with parental involvement.

The following are facts and information about how to use music, along with movement, to teach these important skills for school:

How Music and Movement Prepares Infants and Toddlers to Become Social Beings

  • Babies and parents practice a “social rhythm,” where within a fraction of a second of interaction, they are imitating the movements and expressions of the other. This “mimicking game” between parent and baby continues and evolves into taking turns at smiling, gestures, mouth movements, etc., building a bond between parent and child.
  • By the Age of 2, children start to show signs of compassion, and parents should support their show of concern for others by modeling compassion at home to help build strong social bonds early in life.
  • Building strong bonds and modeling compassion are the two key practices for building social skills.
  • Many early childhood music programs imitate this “social rhythm,” asking parents to participate by taking turns with small vocal and gestural queues. This eventually gives the child a sense of social awareness of how these actions make an impact in the class.

How Music and Movement Prepares the Preschooler and Beginning School Age Child to Become Social

  • Although it is extremely difficult for parents to do, instilling small wait times before responding to their child’s desires or requests instills the patience it requires to take turns with others. Using call and response songs with children also teaches them patience and how to share and take turns. Early childhood music programs also incorporate movement to these exercises, and parents can do this at home as well.
  • Talk and sing to your child a lot. You are preparing your child to communicate with others and building key reading readiness skills.

Music, along with movement, are important methods of teaching children societal skills such as sharing, learning to speak for themselves, and taking turns. This learning process starts with parents at home through imitation games, which can also be reinforced on a larger scale in early childhood music classrooms.

*Musikgarten Delivers: The Neuroscience of Music collection by Dr. Dee Coulter is available for $10 in the Product Catalog section of our Teacher Portal. Username and password are required. You may also contact Musikgarten at 800-216-6864 to purchase.