Music Lessons for 3-5 Year Olds
From Birth to 5 years (Overview)
Notes from The Music Advantage: How Music Helps Your Child Develop, Learn and Thrive by Anita Collins
Babies hear their mother’s voice as music.
The necessary neural connections for reading are active when a toddler can keep a steady beat.
To babies, all sound is actually music, and they process it in their brains using the fundamental characteristics of music (pitch, rhythm, dynamics, timbre).
At birth, a healthy, full-term baby can’t see very well, can’t move with any intention or control, has taste buds that are all about milk, and its sense of smell hasn’t had much exposure. But their hearing is perfect! It is primed and ready to start taking in information. Use this!
For babies, sound is food for their brains. Sound is a cognitive nutrient (touch, facial expression, eye contact) that helps babies understand their world. From this cognitive info, babies learn:
Who their carers are: every person’s voice has a unique musical signature
Understand the nuances of that voice: positivity, emotion, love, using eye contact and sound to help develop a bond
Think about the sound environments we create, allow, and control for our young children. Silence is starving the brain of cognitive nutrients; the key is to provide sound variety.
When it comes to children, especially young children, auditory overload can happen very quickly.
Watch their reactions to sounds; environment can affect them more than you think.
Simplest habit we can develop is adjusting our children’s sound environment when we speak to them—they need to be able to separate speech from all other noises (radio on in the car, TV on as background, etc. can lead to overload)
“Sound is music, and music is information for our brains.”
The Power of Lullaby – Why Your Baby Responds to Music
Notes from The Music Advantage: How Music Helps Your Child Develop, Learn and Thrive by Anita Collins
If you can speak, you can sing
You are your baby’s favorite rock star.
Babies understand the world through their ears as rhythm, pitch, contour and timbre, and use sound to identify the important things, like who their primary caregivers are/who they can trust
Babies need to know who the people around them are as soon as possible; at birth, babies only see vague shapes, identify faces, some movement, and strong colors. They can’t move with control or intention, and smell and taste are just starting. But their brains are wired for sound, and the sound of your voice is their favorite station.
Every voice has a specific auditory signature.
“Motherese”: hyper happy speech, positive and emotional, pitch is higher and wider, rhythm is longer, dynamics are louder, and quick sounds avoided.
For babies, sound is music, and music is information; song is far more interesting than speech.
Babies prefer song or motherese over speech and can maintain an interest in it for far longer – being able to maintain attention for longer than a few seconds allows babies to take in more information, and this (attention span) is the very basis of learning; the more practice we give babies through singing to them, the longer their attention span becomes.
Vowel sounds are the most common in all languages, so those are identified first, then consonants – usually “da da” for daddy (try saying “ma” slowly- takes much more control to make “m” sound)
STUDY: Singing and moving to a beat with an infant contributes to forming a trusting bond between an infant and an UNfamiliar adult – this led to those infants identifying that adult as needing help with a situation AND led them to take ACTION to help (music creates a primal connection); they were far more likely to see the problem AND take action to assist = EMPAHTY = ability to feel for AND have the agency to help others)
Singing to our babies is not a luxury, but a fundamental need.
Sing TO your babies, not at them or near them. LOOK at them and maintain their attention for as long as you can. Take control of the other sounds in their environment and take one minute out of each day to sing to them.
Sing to create connection, sing to reinforce safety, and sing to make yourself feel good. Singing is an effective tool in treating postpartum depression, improving mood, and moderating physiological symptoms of stress. Sing to create empathy (which is incredibly hard to teach/feel).
Toddlers
Notes from The Music Advantage: How Music Helps Your Child Develop, Learn and Thrive by Anita Collins
Toddlers must use song as a transition tool to acquire confident language skills.
“Cuteism”= toddlers playing with combinations of syllables (creating adorable words)
“Cuteism” = toddlers making a phonological representation (brain recording) of specific language sounds
How do toddlers make these “sound recordings” of speech sounds? Depends on:
Each child’s predisposition for auditory processing: will only be enhanced/realized if we get opportunities in childhood to develop them
Through sound/speech environment: toddlers need rich and varied sound environments, lots of speech, familiar and unfamiliar people speaking to them in a variety of different ways and in different environments
Speech SOUNDS need to vary – not just positive language; as he grows, his brain acts as a language sponge; he needs all the colors of the rainbow when it comes to speech. If music is sound and sound is information, then speech is the gold mine of sound information.
Toddlers need EVERYTHING: joyous, angry, uncertain, calm – each speech sound has a different rhythm and melody (remember, this is processed as MUSIC!) and this feeds and grows their auditory processing networks (adds to their library of sound recordings – the bigger the library, the better)
Music trains the auditory processing network, which is responsible for language learning.
If you can’t hear it, you can’t say it; if you can’t say it, you can’t read it. If you can’t read it, you can’t use it in advanced written or spoken language. (TALK/SING TO YOUR CHILD!)
Toddlers often sing nonstop – they’re using their music processing network to figure out the incredibly complex cognitive task of learning how to master language.
Read to your children often and in a sound environment that doesn’t make their brains work too hard to separate the sounds.
We are their auditory models in EVERYTHING: speech sounds, sentence structure, and especially tone; we are their 1st and most influential language teachers and what comes out of our mouths goes straight into their ears and gets recorded and stored into their auditory library.
Your voice is a song inside your toddler’s ears, filled with information.
Toddlers and Beat
Toddlers want to explore and test out what they are learning their bodies can do. And their bodies are growing at an extremely rapid rate, so they constantly have new ways to move, new muscles to explore! = ”the wiggles”! It can be incredibly tough for them to sit still, so we try to move around the studio in our lessons as much as we can.
They use beat to teach their bodies how to move with control and intention.
Music-rich environments help toddlers to learn to control their bodies and synchronize their brains.
Finding/keeping the beat=identifying patterns and then predicting the next sound, number, or action in a sequence= the bread and butter of the first year of schooling=the basis of all learning We emphasize the word “pattern” a lot in our lessons and are constantly identifying them
A lack of musical play and beat-keeping games can have a detrimental effect on a child’s brain development.
Neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to change): musicians were found, even early on, to have higher levels of neuroplasticity (teaching an old dog new tricks, growth mindset vs fixed mindset).
Every culture has songs that require toddlers to predict where the clap should be:
“B-I-N-G-O” : requires an internal sense of the underlying beat, memory of song structure, preparation of hands to clap, movement of hands just before the beat, letters of the alphabet, spelling, AND changing the pattern with each verse (!!!) …in other words, this is a GREAT activity to do with your little one! Mental work out!
Your little one needs to watch you clap along to music, they need you to hold their hands and help them to clap in time, and it needs to happen every day (even something as simple as swaying in time with them on your lap, tapping the steering wheel to the beat of the song on the radio, etc.)
Try not to thwart the beat-keeping process, as annoying as it may be (kicking the table=connecting her auditory and motor cortices with a complex cognitive process) while balancing cultural expectations (pissing off the entire restaurant)
It is vital that the element of symbol-to-sound connection is included from the beginning. In musical story time, after they have achieved clapping and talking at the same time AND to the beat, I will POINT to the notes on the page as we speak/TAP the notes on the page (symbol to sound)
Ensures the capacity for music reading to support language reading is utilized
Allows children to develop effectively as musicians If they can’t keep a beat in a piano lesson with just themselves, they won’t be able to play with a band/orchestra later on
Connecting what they see with what they hear is a pre-literacy workout! This is why at the end of (some, not all) lessons, I ask the student if they’d like to do the “flying birds” game on the ipad, in which they must tap the birds to create a sound (piano, violin, etc.), and the sounds create a song (Twinkle, Twinkle, etc.). They are tapping the birds as they fly onto the screen from left to right, just as we read music – and books! They are also tapping the birds in a pattern, which is the essence of learning (up, down, up, down). The birds act as the symbols (visual) that they must tap (motor) and then hear (auditory) – all to a beat!
Fire truck/ambulance: first see then hear then identifyhear then identify then see – this development in learning is visual processing in the brain talking to the auditory processing, making a connection, creating a 2-way path, which will be applied to other things that make noise (animals, musical instruments, words, sentence structure)
There’s another app called “Rhythm Swing” (usually for 5+ since the alligator can be a bit scary!) in which the student must tap the ipad to the beat of the music. Some songs are fast; others slow. If the student does not keep a steady beat, the animated monkey falls out of the tree and they lose a “monkey life”– they have 3 monkey lives, and then they get eaten by an alligator! The music notes are on the screen, so they SEEING the symbols (visual) as they TAP the screen (motor cortices) and also HEAR the notes (auditory). They also must WAIT to tap the screen until the voice says “ready, play” – this develops their inhibitory control (more on that below). There are quarter notes, half notes, etc., so they are ALSO counting the beats out loud and HOLDING certain notes for longer periods of time. This app is a workout for their brain!
The phonological loop (symbol to sound):
Eyes see a symbol on the page (a letter or a note)
Brain hears that sound (sound of the letter or sound of the note)
Brain tells the body how to make that sound (hold your tongue a certain way and say the letter or press this key on the piano)
Body makes the sound (the letter “t” or the note middle C)
Ears check that the sound is correct
Repeat
Adults are highly evolved learners and don’t need to see things too many times to commit them to memory/create a new neural connection. We are building on a whole city of neural connections, so adding in a new road isn’t hard. But for children, their brains are an open field with a few gravel roads. Their experiences build the roads and highways and we, the parents(/teachers), are the steering committee for the construction!
Repetition is vital when making the visual/auditory connection between symbols and sounds (bouncing ball on words on Sesame Street makes those connections—try to do this when reading –wait for your child to figure out the word in their head and try not to interrupt with the letter sounds. This is why you will hear us sing the same songs and read the same musical stories and play the same musical games again and again and again! Each song, each story, each game has a learning objective, and the more times we sing/read/play, the stronger that road of that learning objective is built. (high/low, loud/soft, 1,2,3 sounds, long/short, patterns)
School Ready: how music helps children prepare for Big School
Children use singing to process meaning from the speech of their care-takers and to determine if a new person is to be trusted
Song helps a child feel part of a family or tribe and it is the language that soothes them to sleep
It is their first language of safety, security, and love
The 1st five years are imperative to neural development.
Being sung to and singing with others has a profound effect on all humans at any stage of life, increases brain chemicals (dopamine), reduces cortisol (stress)
Babies fell asleep fastest and slept best when they were placed in their cot and sung to
Some children self-soothe with song
5 Areas Where Music Learning Can be Applied to that Magical Period Just Before “Big School”
#1: Attention Span (3-4 year olds)
Can be fleeting as a fly or an entire episode of a show
Attention span is in many cases the first and most important ingredient of learning.
You cannot learn if you cannot focus, find meaning, and then create memories for more than a few moments at a time.
Structured and sequential music activities are boot camp for the development of attention skills.
3-minute music activity engages multiple senses: moving, listening, watching, performing: hyper-attention across multiple senses, following varied instruction this is why we achieve so many different activities, engage so many senses, even in a 15-minute lesson!
Activities change quickly: great for attention development, must adjust attention to new activity, new expectations, new movement, new concepts
#2: Distinguishing Sounds
Researchers can track the phonological process neurologically, and the ability to distinguish sound is the first and most vital step.
If your child can’t hear speech sounds, and correctly and reliably distinguish between the sounds, then they can’t verbally produce correct sounds; if they can’t produce the correct sounds, they will struggle to read
Hear—>Speak—Read in most literacy programs=Listen—>Sing—>Play or Listen/Watch—>Play or Listen/Watch—>Clap back what I just did!
In a world that is noisier than ever before, it is important to consider how we manage a toddler’s sound environment for their best auditory development.
Be aware of level of noise: volume, complexity, consistency (speak to child without TV drone, make eye contact, allow them to process sounds separately) In musical story time, you will notice (when it’s time to listen/clap) that I turn to the child, make eye contact, gather their FULL attention while I speak/clap to the beat before asking them to clap back. While I’m reading, I am pointing to the words in the book.
Variety, not the lack of noise, is key: exposing toddlers to speech in both quiet and noisy environments and exposing accents is a workout for the auditory processing network
Prosody (the rhythm and melody of speech) is just as important and can be enhanced by music learning Musical storytime is not simply reading a story; I will tell the story using something between my speaking voice and my singing voice, with facial expressions, silly voices, and pauses to interact/ask questions.
#3: Keeping a Beat
Children need to be able to keep a beat to be ready to learn how to read
Being able to keep a steady beat is an indicator that learning to read is ready to happen in the brain
A child’s brain needs to develop a level of sensitivity and synchronization to timing cues in language to learn how to speak, which leads to learning how to read
Pre-literacy phase=the brain being able to process speech sounds (auditory short-term memory) and name the speech sounds (rapid naming) This is why I sometimes have students “say and play” (the note names as they are playing them) or “sing to your fingers!” the note names, making that visual/auditory/kinesthetic – VAK – connection)
STUDY: Children who are able to demonstrate beat entrainment (keeping a steady beat) were found to have higher levels of neural synchronization and had higher pre-reading skills
#4: Socialization/Delayed Gratification
When going to school, there are extra rules on how children are expected to behave.
Inhibitory control helps our desire to go with a natural or habitual response (“I want this book. I am taking this book from that child.”) This is why we turn up our listening ears, and why I insist on “listen first” before they play/clap/speak back. This is why for little, little ones, one of the first things we do is (turn the volume to low and allow them to) “play, play, play!” (allow them to make as much noise as they want in any way that they want, high/low, using fingers/hands, piano/organ/strings sound, etc.) and at a certain point say “stop!” and physically remove their hands from the keyboard if they aren’t able to/choose not to stop on their own. “Play….stop! Play…stop!”
Strong inhibitory control is developed through delayed gratification As per above, in between “play, stop”s…. waiting for 2-5 seconds (seems like forever to them)
Music learning activities “wait your turn” (my turn….listen…your turn…play)
Musically trained children have been found to have particularly high inhibitory control
#5: Ready for School
Musical activities help children find their tribe, know who to trust, feel love and connection, develop the ability to understand speech and then communicate themselves, and wire up their brains effectively, positively, and strongly.