Last week my blog focused on our musicianship classes for older children, so this week I’m going to talk about all the songs and
musical activities we do here at ‘do re mi’ specifically aimed at our babies. This
blog will focus on how we use music with our babies in nursery, and next
week I will talk about our Musical Learning baby classes.
So, within the nursery, we use lots of music in the baby
room just like in all the other rooms. Our practitioners sing with the babies
throughout the day, in addition to me leading slightly more structured music times
across the week.
The main thing we remember with babies is that, although they
aren’t actually joining in with the singing, they are taking it all in and we
see lots of evidence of them feeling the beat: them making body movements or
sounds in time to the beat. We also find the children who have been with us
since babies can often play our instruments in time to the beat from a very
early age. Babies exposed to lots of music also develop what we call a ‘musical
ear’ which means that once they are old enough to join in the singing, they are
able to hear the different pitches clearly and reproduce these in their own singing
accurately.
Being exposed to quality music provision from an early age
doesn’t just benefit musical development, though. There is a huge amount of
research that shows music helps with more general speech and language
development as well. Being exposed to ‘organised sound’ really helps with bringing
on speech. We often find our really young children listen to most of a song and
then join in with one or two words with confidence much earlier than you might
expect, and this is because of the familiarity of these songs.
Songs that use an element of anticipation are really good
for this, so for example our rhyme of the week this week ‘one hop, two hop, I’m
a little frog’ finishes with ‘wheeeeeeee…. Plop!’. The ‘wheee’ builds
anticipation for the plop, and we often extend the ‘whee’ a little longer each
time. The babies definitely know what’s coming with lots of excited arm waving
and those who are starting to develop speech often try saying ‘plop’ as they
feel confident in the context of the familiarity of the rhyme.
Similarly, it isn’t just our structured music time that
helps with speech and language development. We also as practitioners make sure
we communicate with babies in a number of ways, and this can include mirroring the
noises that they make. This means we can have a ‘conversation’ with babies long
before they can actually properly speak. We mirror their ‘coos’, their babbling,
and it's amazing to see the reaction this can bring. It gives the babies a sense
of control that they are able to initiate communication and a real sense of
worth that the adult is copying exactly the noises they are making.
If you’d like to read some of the latest research around
music and speech and language development in the early years, have a look at
the SALTMusic research project here https://www.priorycentre.co.uk/assets/children-and-families/SaltMusic-Research-Report.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment