Here are some helpful and useful tips and resources that could help you in creating a musical experiences for infants and toddlers:The early childhood years are the most crucial years in a child’s life as this can be considered as their formative years. Children who play or sing music regularly perform better in reading and math when they begin elementary school.
Since playing, singing and dancing to music increases both fine and gross motor skills and helps develop hand-eye coordination, children who are musically inclined find it much easier to control their bodies. Those actively involved in music also tend to have high self-esteem and are better at playing with others.
It is, therefore, important for child care providers and preschool teachers to provide an environment rich with music and movement, to allow for the exploration of musical equipment, and to engage in plenty of diverse, stimulating musical activities for infants and toddlers altogether. Not only could this help boost the creativity in every child, it could also help in engaging them and knowing their hidden interests.
Organizations such as the Early Childhood Music and Movement Association and MENC, The National Association for Music Education, recommend ways to encourage music development in infants and toddlers. Child care providers and preschool teachers can engage in activities that involve singing and chanting songs and rhymes that involve a variety of meters and tones.
Music for infants and toddlers should also incorporate a variety of sound sources, and include selected music, as well as improvised songs. Musical choices should vary and include a wide range of culture and styles. MENC also suggests that child care providers and teachers can encourage music development in young children by exposing them to both live and recorded music.
Another important element of which fosters musical development in toddlers is discussion. MENC recommends that child care providers discuss music and its connection to feelings and self expression.
The standards of music programs for four year olds, as they are approaching kindergarten, should involve singing and playing instruments (chanting, singing, and playing age appropriate instruments), creating music (improvising songs and rhymes and short pieces of music), responding to music through movement, and understanding music (describing music and demonstrating their awareness musical elements).
Not only could the children’s interaction with music, sound, rhymes and the like enhance their growth and creativity, it could also serve as an effective tool for them to be sensitive when it comes to their senses, how they interact with other people as well as how they are expected to feel and react with a particular song, rhyme, sound and the like.
Musical programs should definitely be part of any daycare center not only to add something new to the program but also to add a vital program that could help improve and see how infants and toddlers could react and grow as better individuals with the help of music as well as their interaction and inclination to these types of programs.
The relationship between music and talking
Children, at the time of their birth are already able to make use of their voices even though they still could not speak and the like. They are able to experiment the different sounds that they produce as well as the different sound that they hear in their environment and when they hear these types of sounds more often, they tend to develop a certain type of distinction when it comes to these sounds. As a child gets older, it becomes easier for parents and companions to recognize whether or not a particular child is indeed musically inclined or not.
Almost any music student can hum a note struck on a piano keyboard by matching it because the ear and the voice are synchronized. However, when these students are asked to reproduce that same note on an instrument, it takes about three, four or more tries to match the note. The reason is that the ear and the instrument are not as synchronized as the ear and the voice. The student must identify which one of the 12 notes of music has been played before he can reproduce it on this instrument.
Likewise, a student may be able to identify the quality or type of chord, scale or melodic fragment that he or she hears. Incidentally, when students are asked to play it on their instrument, they will have a problem identifying which of the 12 notes they heard. The ability to hum or remember, whistle, or sing, a vast number of tunes is not uncommon, but ask students to duplicate them on their instruments and the same problem will occur. Not to worry.
To become a professional musician, a student must acquire as much facility for reproducing melodic lines on his musical instrument as he is able to reproduce with his voice. Further, an improvising musician must be able to reproduce melodies originating in his or her imagination. In order to achieve instrumental facility and a smooth flow of melodic lines either as reproductions from memory or original tunes from the imagination, and in order to hear sounds and then play them on their instruments, all major and minor scales or musical dialects, with their respective chord progressions should be memorized.
This takes practice. Practice doesn't have to be a dirty word. In fact, practicing can actually be fun, when done in moderation. Here are a few tips shared by fellow musicians and teachers.
Play pieces backwards (read every note from bottom of the page up, right to left) play right hand part with left hand and left hand part with left hand play with hands in reversed octaves -- right hand plays right hand part, but in the bass, etc. play right and left hands at different tempos (only works for some pieces) transpose to a different key play a major piece in minor, or minor piece in major.
Buy a sticker book and stickers. Each time practice is good, a song is memorized, or some other objective is reached, the child puts a sticker in the book. When the required number of stickers is earned, a reward is given. "Girls like to be rewarded with letting them make cookies, boys love to put models together."
See: How to start day care business
No comments:
Post a Comment