Why is Music Important for Infants and Toddlers?
In this episode of the Learn With Less podcast, Ayelet is joined by Nancy Kopman, an early childhood educator and composer. Nancy has been creating, testing, developing, recording and performing her catchy, educational songs for children 0-10 for over 20 years. Her music can be found on TV, radio and online.
Nancy’s work is celebrated worldwide by educators, therapists, family program directors, parents and caregivers. Her music is used in schools, daycares, Montessori environments, libraries, camps, internet radio and other children’s environments.
On this episode, we discuss the ways in which music help to foster social/emotional development, what parents and caregivers can do to use music (even when they don’t consider themselves musical), and Nancy’s top tips and favorite resources for using music to engage with your baby and/or toddler.
Great resources we mentioned in this podcast episode:
Sesame Street songs on YouTube
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Nancy: Website / YouTube / Facebook / Instagram
Text Transcript of this episode
Ayelet: Today, I am speaking with early childhood educator and composer Nancy Kopman. Nancy has been creating, testing, developing, recording, and performing her short, catchy educational songs for children zero to 10 years for over 20 years. Her music can be found on TV, radio and online. She performs regularly in Toronto, Ontario and she does virtual video visits with her far away fans. Love the alliteration, by the way.
Her work is celebrated worldwide by educators, therapists, family program directors, parents, and caregivers. Nancy believes that music is more than a universal language: it’s a communication tool that works far deeper than words. Music can soothe, reassure, comfort, validate, stimulate, relax and elicit joy and people of all ages, cultures, abilities and intellectual capacity.
Music connects us at the roots of our instincts, making it a necessary tool in teaching and nurturing, developing minds. Nancy, I am in complete agreement with all of that and I want to thank you for being here. Welcome to Learn With Less.
Nancy: Thank you so much for having me. It is such an honor and a pleasure to align my work with the work that you are doing, which I admire so much and feel is so important and I follow you every single day. So thank you very much for having me today.
Ayelet: Thank you, Nancy. Well, I have asked you to come onto the show today to speak to us about all of the very many benefits of music for infants and toddlers. But first let’s just give a, give us a sense about more about you and how you got actually into the work that you’re doing today.
Nancy: Okay, well, my background, let me start at the very beginning. My background is, uh, you know, my, like you, my philosophy as an educator is that we’re, we’re each born with an innate strengths and specific inclinations. And as you know, with the wonderful work you do, it’s our early life experiences that influence what we do with those attributes, um, who we ultimately become and how we design and implement our purpose into our community.
So my background is that I come from a long line of educators, therapists, and musicians. So my developmental years were really saturated with opportunities to learn and observe how music in combination with emotional and intellectual nurturing can positively affect one’s development.
Growing up I was formally musically trained with what’s called in Canada, the Royal Conservatory of Music. Um, it’s a method for learning the piano and I, I studied voice and flute and, uh, I learned to play the guitar on my own. And one of my favorite pastimes was experimenting with multiple tape recorders. That just goes to show you how old I am.
And I used to just experiment with those tape recorders and record my own little songs. Um, I would do that for hours. My formal education is, I have two degrees, one in sociology with a focus on international education and another degree in early childhood education. But even though I learned a great deal about education on paper, I have to say that my Eureka moments in terms of combining music and education first came from my practical experience as a student teacher.
I noticed very early on that singing little songs was magically effective with young children, whether they were songs that included directions for lining up or moving parts of the body, or even encouraging, relaxing and resting. Yeah. So it was during my first few years as a preschool teacher that I started creating my own little musical tunes to well-known nursery rhymes. And that developed into singing little tunes that I, that I made up myself.
When I started teaching kindergarten, I was able to create more complicated songs to help my students remember specific concepts, like the names of the planets and what initial letter sounds were even how to sing the alphabet backwards. That’s a fun song.
So pretty soon I had a small little repertoire of songs with content I had created myself. And it wasn’t long before my coworkers were asking me to record myself singing those songs so they could use them in their classrooms. So after I left the kindergarten classroom to start having children of my own, I started recording these little songs and running small music and movement groups around the city of Toronto.
And then with the infinite reach of the internet, it was very, very easy to connect with other educators and parents much like how I did with you. And now I have connected with so many people organically all over the world who either have young children or who work with them. So that’s the metamorphosis of how I started to where I am today. It’s all very natural how everything unfolded.
Ayelet: Totally. And I love it because I think our stories, you and I are, we have so much similarity. It just came totally organically out of our interests and our own experience and that’s a great way to do it.
Nancy: I couldn’t agree more. I have to say that the most important, yeah, influencers of what I do are people I’ve come across who I’ve actually become friends with like you who share this philosophy and who share a certain type of energy and a relaxed outlook, but at the same time have a very focused outlook on how to educate children starting from when they’re babies.
Ayelet: Well, you and I both know that music can support all areas of development and it is a big part of how I help families connect with their infants and toddlers in my Learn With Less™ Curriculum. But I know that your latest album focuses more specifically on social and emotional development. So let’s chat a little bit about that. How can music help to foster social/emotional development in especially the youngest of our little ones?
Nancy: Well, it’s a, that’s, it’s an easy concept, but it’s a very complicated layered answer. A piece of music is comprised of multiple layers and elements that trigger emotional responses, as far as I’m concerned. I think a lot of people feel that way too.
If you think of a song that you know that makes you feel tired or a song that makes you cry or makes you want to dance and sing out loud, I do that when I’m driving. I don’t know if you do too, but I know a lot of people who do that. It’s my own little dance party. So these responses, these emotional responses are all the result of the timing of a piece of music, the color of the music, the instruments, the percussion, et cetera, et cetera.
When I’m writing a piece of music that is designed to open up an emotional window, so to speak, I carefully select the elements of that piece so that they reflect the purpose of the song. The lyrics are secondary, but they also play a very important role in awakening and creating a point of reference.
For example, I have a song called Breathe in, Breathe out and in that song the music is designed to sound like a breath in and a breath out. And I actually timed the song according to my own breathing patterns. So it’s a very natural flow of and very conducive to breathing. And it’s designed to help children deep breathe and relax. Something that’s very important to a lot of educators right now, in terms of self regulation and when it’s practiced, it becomes an emotional tool for self regulation.
But it’s the style of the music that I feel helps people feel that they are part of the song. Another example is my song Hard Feelings from my latest album, Senses. The music starts off a little bit sad and a little bit down sounding. And as the, as the lyrics describe how everyone has hard feelings, but that feelings come and feelings go. And the lyrics offer advice when it’s happening. “Stop and say what it was that made you feel that way. Take a breath, close your eyes to take some time to think and try to work through your hard feelings.”
So it’s supposed to be like the way I was as a teacher, as I am with a teacher or with young children, I do tend to stop and sing a song that they are familiar with to help them remember the words of the song. It’s like an emotional trigger and a point of reference. And then that, that song ends with the music gradually becoming brighter as the lyrics teach children to tell yourself you’ll be okay. “Everything will be okay.”
And songs like that help them stop and emotionally reset themselves when they find themselves in social situations that call for it acting like a, an inner voice because they’ve heard the song enough times to become part of their consciousness. I see that happen so many times.
Ayelet: Absolutely and I love how you described how the, the actual music, the rhythm, the color, the brightness, the tones and even the rhythm can all influence that and all have a piece to do with that teaching and the influence of how a song can affect us, but also the theme and the lyrics themselves and all of it teaches about these skills, right? About self regulation, about labeling and identifying emotions so that we can use them, and about, you know, just how to use these tools to equip us as children and as adults to utilize what we have available to us. I love it.
Nancy: That’s a really good point because I do find, coming from the background that I come from, which was a very emotionally supportive background, because of my parents’ parenting style and from what I was surrounded with, that… That was a real luxury to grow up with that kind of reinforcement and validation and support and not everybody has those emotional tools, unfortunately, in their background. So I do weave a lot of what works for me and what did work for me and what works for my family into the lyrics that I write for my songs so that they are a tool for parents, too. And, and like I said before, the music just makes it so much easier to remember.
Ayelet: Right. And exactly like it’s such an important point. We’re talking about the benefits of music for babies and toddlers, but who is the vehicle that is going to serve that? Of course it’s the parent and caregiver. It’s the adult in the room. So that’s great.
Nancy: And that’s why you do what you do. You’re offering those tools to people and that’s why I do what I do. And that’s what brought what drew me to your work because your little videos of you singing little songs and holding onto your little one’s feet and then turning to the screen and saying, “this is why I do it this way. And this is how you could also do it.” It’s, that’s a valuable resource to people who, let’s face it, we become parents whether we’re ready to or not or whether we know what we’re doing or what, whether we don’t know what we’re doing.
And the parents who do choose to make the most of learning opportunities, we need all the help we can get, all of us. So we reach out to people who, who we feel reflects the parenting style that we want for ourselves. So we can share that through the work that you and I do.
Ayelet: Exactly. And I think, you know, we tend as parents, so many parents and caregivers tend to ask the question, you know, what can I buy? What can I get? And creating these experiences of… Whether they’re musical movement, you know, language or, or just play in general. Like, it’s so all of it, that’s what we need, right? That’s what both of us teach.
I think when, when we can show families that it’s, it’s already in your home, it’s, it’s what you use in the environment, whether it’s the music that you put on or the song that you sing or during that caregiving routine or doing that daily routine or the transition from one thing to the next, like you mentioned earlier. Like those are such powerful moments wherein we can utilize things like music and language and it’s just so important.
Okay. So I have personally always loved using music with young children. I’ve done so as a pediatric speech language pathologist, as well as in my work as a parent educator and most definitely as a mom. But I know that, you know, being musical does not feel natural to every parent or caregiver out there.
So what do you say to families who sort of have more difficulty getting musical? What suggestions do you have for them as far as harnessing the benefits of music, even if they don’t consider themselves musical? And we’ll get into a little bit more specific tips and resources later on in the show, but give us a little bit of what you know, what is something that you tend to say to people?
Nancy: Well that’s actually one of the most common, that’s one of the most common things I hear from parents and educators. I actually heard it today from someone requesting to join my group on Facebook. It’s, it’s uh, I am joining the group because I can’t sing, I don’t sing, I don’t know how to sing or I don’t sing well. I don’t have a good singing voice. I don’t like singing in front of people.
So one of my main goals with my songs and my resources, like my videos for people is, is to just turn it on and follow along with me. You don’t have to be a good singer, you don’t have to know anything about music, just follow me. But I’ve done all the work for you. I have, as you mentioned, 20 plus years of experience developing these songs, testing them with children, testing them with parents, testing them with children and parents together.
I’ve got it all for you. All you have to do is just turn it on and follow. All of my music is available on iTunes and Spotify and YouTube and you just follow along. I also have a specific series of YouTube videos called Follow Nancy where you basically have a virtual music teacher singing and showing you the action. So like I said, just put it on and follow.
Besides that, I make my songs really easy to remember and interpret or change with your own words or concepts or lyrics. Like I have said. Like I said before though, you don’t need to know how to sing well. You just don’t. You can be totally tone deaf. You just need to know and listen very carefully. People out there who are worried about your musical knowledge or abilities or singing voice.
You don’t have to know how to sing well. You just need to know how to have fun singing. So let that sink in for a second. That comes from releasing yourself from judgment of your own voice. Just you. It doesn’t matter how you sound when you’re singing with children, what matters most is that you’re singing together. Children don’t judge you, you judge you.
One of the first things that I learned that was so liberating in my early childhood education degree was I had this teacher in the very first day that we started. She said, you’re each going to come up here and take turns doing something really silly. You’re going to make a silly noise and you’re going to do something silly with your face, and you’re gonna mess up your hair and you’re going to jump up and down. Every single one of you has to do that. And that’s how you’re going to be introduced to the concept of not caring what you look like and not caring what you sound like. Because children don’t judge.
Ayelet: And in fact, they actually learn that judgment through us when we judge ourselves.
Nancy: Unfortunately. Yes. So we have to, we have to remember that we are a role model for them in so many capacities when we’re teaching. And one of the most important ones is to forget your judgment of yourself and, and just have fun. If you’re not having fun, they’re not having fun. So it doesn’t matter if you have the best singing voice and you’re nervous in front of them they are going to catch onto your nervousness and they’re going to fixate on that and wonder why you’re nervous and learn to be nervous. If you have, if you’re completely tone deaf and you’re having a great time jumping and singing and using instruments and have a big smile on your face, they’re learning happiness from you. So that’s my answer.
Ayelet: Perfect. I love that. They’re learning happiness from you.
Nancy: Yeah! It all starts with happiness.
Ayelet: That’s great. Okay, well we’re going to take just a brief break to hear a word from our sponsors and then we are going to hear a few tips from Nancy about the benefits of music with tiny humans. And we will hear about her favorite resources for parents and caregivers interested in learning more about this topic.
Ayelet: Okay, Nancy, let’s hear it. We would like to get your top tips for parents and caregivers who want to engage musically with their infants and toddlers.
Nancy: Okay. Well, it’s very, very easy to engage a baby if you know what’s important to them. So with infants, I always recommend that you thing facing each other as much as possible. For example, I have a song called Bicycle, which is from my album, “I Know I’ll Grow.” And the way I usually implement the song is I ask parents to lie there, maybe down on their back or in their laps with their legs out straight and you take their little legs and you’re looking at each other’s faces and you take their little legs and you follow along with the song and they learn the different words in the song for fast and slow and up and down and all of those things. But while you’re engaging with an infant, regardless of what song you’re using, I always recommend that you over annunciate or accentuate the words and change your facial expression a lot while you’re singing and turn your head a lot so they see the different sides of your face.
So they’ll see the different aspects of your face and how you communicate. And you can make different sounds. You can be loud, you can be quiet, you can whisper using different sounds with your mouth. Is, is a good one for babies. They love that and they love patterning. So, I have a song I like to make music and it’s all about Clap, Clap, Clap and Pat, Pat, Pat your knees and then it makes the clicking sound and with your mouth and I’m telling you, they love to watch and they love to imitate.
They love it when you help them do the clapping and the patting. And you wouldn’t believe how early some infants tried to emulate the clicking and the popping of their mouths. I’ve seen really, really young babies do that. Bouncing up and down and making a simple noise pattern. Like my song, “The Animals,” again from I know I’ll grow, that’s my first album. And uh, I wrote that song actually holding a baby in my arms and just bouncing up and down, going, “bum, bum, bum, bum bum.”
And they become fascinated with your mouth movements and the sound. And of course repetition. Repetition is really key with infants, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Yeah. So any kind of song with a pattern, songs with actions, do the actions yourself and then guide your baby to do the actions with his or her or their body. Like, “Everybody clap, everybody clap your hands, clap your hands” and then it changes. “Everybody stomp your feet, stomp your feet.” And when you’re able to sing the song without singing along with me, I recommend that you say “these are your hands are clapping your hands. These are your feet. You’re stomping your feet.” So you’re naming the body parts and I’m telling the the baby what you’re doing with all of these things. Compile and they register every little thing you say and do.
Ayelet: And it’s a beautiful way to reinforce all areas of development. Like we were saying, like all of that is vocabulary, which is communication, development of course, and concept building, especially with those opposite words or those action words… Motor development, when you’re actually doing those actions. And of course social emotional development when you’re interacting with your adult counterpart, it’s just, it’s so rich.
Nancy: It’s… emulating! You can even do it. You can even do songs like, “Pat, Pat, Pat,” which is another one of mine where I recommend that you put them on their tummy for tummy time. Everybody knows how important tummy time is. And again, it’s a pattern and it’s stimulating physically as well as an auditory stimulation.
It’s “Pat, Pat, Pat, Pat, Pat, Pat,” and then they’re getting a massage and forgetting that they’re on their tummies, which sometimes they don’t like so much, but because of the stimulation and the music, they forget that they’re on their tummies. So you’re strengthening their bodies as well as their minds.
Ayelet: Just by touching, talking and using a melody. It’s just so simple. Yeah, it is so simple. I love the…. Your piece, your example of the “bum, bum” like you, it does not have to be classical music people like sure. That’s one wonderful way. And the Hamilton soundtrack is another and you know what, like any, any music is great! We just want it, it can be so simple and so complex and you can make it whatever you want. And often the most… The simpler, the more engaging.
Nancy: I couldn’t agree more. And, and just thinking about the different words that you’re using as part of your movements, like the word “stop,” that’s a big one for me. When I’m teaching a music and movement class, I, I sing a song like, like my song, “Walk around, Walk around.” and you bounce, bounce, bounce and you go side to side and everything. And then I will inject the word stop into it and I put my hands up and I say “stop!” And then it’s, I instruct the parents to be silent because that’s how you learn what the word stop means.
And when you look at the baby’s faces, when you stop and you’re holding your hands up and then you repeat it again, the next time that you come around, you’re reminding them of what they’ve just learned and they’re like, Oh yeah, that’s what stop means. You see that, you see the mental wheels turning as you teach them… Just the most simplest of concepts like stop. So it is so easy. I can talk about it for hours.
Ayelet: That’s why you’re here! I’d love to hear what are some of your favorite resources that you like to share with families? I know that you are an absolutely invaluable resource and experience, and you mentioned your YouTube videos and your YouTube channel, which is so great people you got to follow Nancy.
Nancy: Oh yeah. My, my YouTube channel is, everything is Music With Nancy. So if you forget my name, Nancy Kopman, you can always go to my website, which is musicwithnancy.com and all of my resources are there. I’m on Instagram as @musicwithnancy. I’m on Twitter as Music with Nancy, but my my YouTube channel is Music With Nancy and that’s, that’s where all of my specific songs and my specific resources are. I often recommend you as one of my favorite resources, if I’m going to be honest. I’ve brought a lot of people into your world and they just love you. We talk about you here in Canada and you’re very well known.
Some of my other favorite resources are Teach Preschool, which is a blog. I love the simple and nurturing approach to teaching children often outside exploring nature, which is really important to me. I also love pre-K Pages. I love Preschool Inspirations. These are all blogs and bloggers who have become colleagues to me, much like you have become, because we all have very similar outlooks on how to approach teaching, and what the most important elements are in teaching young children specifically.
And not just teaching them math and language and academic things. It’s more about the importance of teaching children to respect themselves and respect others and to build a community and interact within that community with respect and gratitude and satisfaction and respect for other people’s feelings. And there are a lot of very valuable lessons that can be learned from those resources that I mentioned.
Ayelet: Absolutely. And we’ll link to all of them in the show notes for this episode.
Nancy: Yeah, yeah. There are so many. Um, gosh, let’s see. There’s other music that I grew up with, Schoolhouse Rock, which is really fun! The best composers. And that was actually one of the biggest inspirations for me becoming a children’s musician because I learned so much specific information from all of those songs.
And of course, Sesame Street, I have to say that the older, because that’s the Sesame Street I remember, the Sesame Street from the early seventies. There are so many really amazing in between cartoons and videos that you can find on YouTube, as well as the, the Burt and Ernie stuff, which is all about social interaction. And it’s musical as well.
Many of the composers on Sesame Street were some of my favorite musical composers of all time. So, like Christopher Cerf and Joe Rapozo and Jerry Nelson. There’s just so many, so many valuable educators and musicians on that show. So that’s another resource that I like to point people to. I’m sure there are thousands more, but I don’t want to take up too much more of your time.
Ayelet: Actually, I’d love to hear like who are some of your top three say other children’s musicians like that you grew up with and you find yourself loving and referencing, or that you’ve found recently?
Nancy: Mmm, well I grew up with Rafi and I also grew up with, like I said, I’m Sesame Street’s music. I had all of their records. And not so much a children’s musician, but Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons I was obsessed with, with their greatest hits album growing up to the point where I forced my parents to tape record the record player playing through the speaker so that I could listen to it in the car, because I had to, I’m one of those people who needs to listen to something over and over and over and over and over so that it cements itself in my head so I can access all the details of the music at any time. I know it might sound weird, but that’s just what I…
Ayelet: No! I love actually, how high tech that was at the time! What you just mentioned!
Nancy: Yeah! I came up with that idea myself.
Ayelet: That’s brilliant!
Nancy: Uh, so yeah, who else did I listen to growing up role?
Ayelet: I love also what you just said, like I mean I said children’s music specifically, but just as we were talking about, there are benefits to music that is for children because it does all those wonderful things like the repetition, the slowing down or the more enunciating and focusing on things that are often just right there in their environment, which is some of why I love your music so much, but there’s so much value to other music and I, that’s another question that I think I get all the time and I’m sure you do, is like, is it okay to be playing other music for my children? And like, yes, of course! Like it’s all different patterns. It’s all different tones. It’s all different rhythms and all of that informs the brain making these wonderful connections.
Nancy: I couldn’t agree more and every, every musician has a different standpoint or a different angle. So absolutely listen to the music that you like best. If you like led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, listen to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd! If you like the Beatles, I can’t think of a bandwidth more diverse song pattern formulas or chord progressions and the Beatles that, I mean, they were geniuses. So why not play that type of music for your babies so that they learn to develop those neural pathways?
There was also, I thought of one more just before we started talking about this, Free to Be You and Me, which was a series from the 70s that was just a wonderful package of all kinds of different songs that had different, very important messages to nurture children’s emotional growth and self-awareness. And uh, that, that is definitely a must-have for every parent. Free to Be You and Me. Yeah, that’s a classic. It is. It is.
Ayelet: Well, thank you so, so much Nancy and thanks to all of our participants of the Learn With Less Curriculum Online Program who are here listening live. We are going to continue the discussion and open up for a Q and a session with you guys in just a minute, but for everyone listening from home or on the go, thank you so much for joining us and we will see you next time.
