How Music and Singing Promote Early Language Development in Infants and Toddlers
In this session of the Learn With Less podcast (a special episode brought to you in partnership with the pod-conference, SLP Live), we discussed different ways that music and singing promotes early language development in infants and toddlers.
We also discussed research that supports the use of music as a framework to support communication development. In addition, we explored different strategies to help keep a young child engaged in musical activities.
Hi, I’m Ayelet Marinovich, your host. Welcome to Learn With Less, a family enrichment program for parents, caregivers, and educators working with infants and toddlers of all developmental levels.
In this podcast series, we get together to sing a few songs, discuss some ideas for play, outlines, some insight about early development and talk about life as a parent or caregiver in these early years of parenthood.
The mission of Learn With Less® is to provide peace of mind families already have everything they need to support the infants and toddlers in their lives.
Now, before we get started, I would like to take a moment to let you know that I am the creator of the Learn With Less® Curriculum, the basis for which is outlined in my best selling books, Understanding Your Baby and Understanding Your Toddler. The Learn With Less® Curriculum also exists as both a live, local offering for families provided by me and a group of licensed facilitators, and as a virtual program.
I am the sole recording artist on my musical album, which I do mention later in the episode, called Strength In Words: Music For Families. As the creator of the Learn With Less® Curriculum, I do receive royalties and collect membership and licensing fees. I’m also the host of the Learn With Less podcast, which is a free early development and early parenting resource for parents, caregivers and professionals working with families with infants and toddlers, and which occasionally informs my audience about my paid offerings.
I also want to let you know that after listening to this episode of the Learn With Less podcast, you have a few learning outcomes:
- You will be able to identify ways that music and singing promotes early development in infants and toddlers
- You will be able to identify research that supports the use of music as a framework to support early communication
- You’ll be able to pull from a repertoire of songs and rhymes to use in play or a therapeutic context that can target early communication and other early developing skills
- You’ll be able to identify additional songs that you already know that might also be utilized in a learning context
- And you’ll be able to identify strategies to keep a young child engaged in musical activities
Let’s start today’s episode by using our bodies and tapping to the beat. Don’t worry if you don’t consider yourself musical or if the rhythm doesn’t feel like it comes naturally to you. This is about the time you spend with your baby or toddler doing something together. We’ll talk more about why it’s so beneficial later in the episode.
Sings Hello Song
Great job. So that is our hello song and we start with some version of it each time in my podcast. This is a nice way to introduce the idea of ritual to a young child. I think we tend to get pretty caught up with the idea of babies becoming accustomed to routines, but I like to think of rituals as special things we can do within our families. More on that later, though.
So I’m going to be using a mix of real instruments and things you can likely find in your home or can easily create out of items in your home. This is a shaker I made out of an empty container and a few rolls of scotch tape. The lid stays on with an added layer of baby proofing duct tape for peace of mind…
Sings Rain, Rain, Go Away
Now this is, of course, a nursery rhyme that I’ve put to a tune. Just using the rhythm and simply chanting the rhyme might be appealing for some of you out there. And that’s fine too. In fact, alternating rhythmic and melodic versus is a nice way to highlight different parts of musical experiences for your child.
Rain, rain, gall while way, come again another day, my sweet baby wants to play. So rain, rain, go away.
All right, so I wanted to take a moment and just speak about why we as parents and caregivers are always hearing people say things like, “Oh, play music for your baby, sing to your baby.” We hear it’s important and useful to expose your baby to music and rhythms and songs, but why now we’re going to get deeper into this in just a second and then we’re going to come back and I’ll show you a few other ways to utilize music within routines and rituals and talk a little bit more about why that’s so important.
But let’s get to some of the research first. Okay. So I think that many of us have seen firsthand the power of music, right? We know that it can capture the attention of young children. We know that playing music and playing different kinds of music has an effect on our own mood and state.
But what is it about that act of singing to a young child that is so magical? We know that infants and toddlers learn holistically, meaning that learning in one area cannot be separated from learning in another. They truly are learning through experience and in order to do that, each part of learning influences and informs another. I think that this quote from early childhood professional, Rebecca Parlakian sums up the beauty of the musical experience really nicely.
Like all the best learning experiences in early childhood music activities simultaneously promote development in multiple domains, singing a lullaby while rocking a baby stimulates early language development, promotes attachment, and supports an infant’s growing spatial awareness as the child experiences her body moving in space.
Rebecca Parlakian
Music truly is a tool that naturally creates a holistic learning environment. When you move to the rhythm, you move your body either with large or small movements, engaging various muscle groups.
When you listen and sing to a melody, it’s similar to intonation in our speech patterns, the various parts of a song like versus or a chorus create a pattern which we then decode and classify of the various elements.
Finally we think of musical experiences as a moment of togetherness where we can look at each other, dance with each other and play together. So music really does beautifully address and help to promote all areas of development.
And you can see how each of these elements is intricately layered on top of one another and is happening simultaneously and cannot be separated.
So let’s talk about what it is that singing provides from a speech and language perspective.
When we sing to a young child, we model first various components of language we model and make use of the vocabulary in a song. So when we sing a song over and over, that provides many opportunities to hear not only the speech sounds of particular words strung together, but also exposure to vocabulary.
We can add to the experience of that vocabulary by using those words in context, putting music in the context of play or any of caregiving routines and singing about actions or concepts were engaged with or objects and people around us.
When we sing, we also model phrasing in songs. Just like in speech, there are complete thoughts expressed within a conversation. These phrases in music are part of an overall structure and those are grouped by meter and tempo. There are rhythmic rules that govern a song which sometimes help to determine the genre of music.
When we speak, we also use phrases in the form of punctuation or pauses. We also model grammar by singing within music. Just like when we speak, we can model various kinds of sentences such as questions, commands or statements.
In song, we often use rhyming words, which helps to call attention to similarities and differences in speech sounds, the technical term for which is phonemic awareness. This kind of skill is essential for spoken language ability as well as for later developing skills like reading and writing. Singing also models the expression of thoughts or feelings.
Elements of music such as phrasing or tonality and tempo affect the emotional quality of a song and fast or slow rhythms or pauses are used to highlight things like emotional content or to create anticipation. This is a beautiful way to integrate and address aspects of social and emotional development.
Finally, singing can beautifully model joint attention skills. Joint attention is essentially the shared attention between you and your child upon another thing, an object or an event. It’s not merely that you are both looking at the same thing but that you’re both using words or gestures, gaze or other nonverbal communication to understand you’re both interested in the same object or event. And this is a crucial piece of communication and something that usually happens sometime in the later part of the first year of life. And it’s also crucial to the act of being musical in a group or with a partner.
So in engaging in musical experiences with young children, we are inherently promoting all areas of development including cognitive communicative motor and sensory and social and emotional domains.
We are also expressly modeling all different areas of speech and language and all different parts of communication, speech sounds or phonemes phonology, small and large units of meanings such as grammatical structures and phrasing, morphology and syntax specific vocabulary, semantics and social language such as emotional language in those parts of nonverbal communication like making eye contact and creating joint attentional opportunities, pragmatics.
This is why music is so powerful. And if we are intentional about creating layers of experiences and approaching musical play from a multi-sensory perspective involving the auditory, visual, tactile, proprioceptive, vestibular, and even gustatory or taste senses, we can truly enhance a young child’s learning. We are going to discuss some of the specific research that supports use of music to promote language learning.
All right, so we know that even within the womb, a fetus receives segmental and super segmental information from outside of the womb. Now what does that mean? So segmental refers to the phonemes or speech sounds and the tones of the voices we hear and super segmental refers to those patterns of rhythm, the stress of the voice, the intonation or malady, what we refer to as prosody of the voice. And we also know that newborns actually prefer their mother’s voices from the first days of infancy and that that is based on this prenatal learning.
So once an infant has been born, research has confirmed that infant directed speech, often referred to as motherese or parentese is universally used by parents and caregivers and can be characterized by elements such as a slower rate, a higher frequency, a greater range of pitch variety, longer pauses and repetitive intonation contouring.
So we know that parents and caregivers all over the world in every language and every culture use distinctive shifts in their speech patterns, like the ones I just mentioned. Research shows that when we use infant directed speech, young children are more and more responsive, they look longer and they focus more and their brains even respond more to hearing infant directed speech when they are sleeping.
So when we think about the kinds of musical experiences we often engage in with young children or what many researchers have dubbed infant directed musical engagement, we think mostly of songs that maybe we use in play or play songs or lullabies, both of which we will hear many examples of.
And these kinds of songs also share cross cultural features and elements used all over the world in all different children’s music such as the inclusion of simple repeated pitch contouring and the tendency of [inaudible] adults to sing familiar songs at the same often higher pitch and the primary shared feature then in infant directed speech and infant directed music is that presynaptic contouring or the tendency to make the voice sound more melodic and to hit an interesting range of pitches that often repeat themselves.
Now, we know that repetition is key when it comes to early learning and now we can be sure that we are clearly helping young children to catch more of what we’re saying or singing by repeating within familiar speech patterns that follow grammatical rules and that change in pitch based on our intention. For instance, whether we’re asking question or making a statement or within a musical context that follows rules governed by rhythm, tempo, tonality, etc.
In every culture around the world, we witness behaviors that adult caregivers perform with young children such as holding and rocking and singing. These are behaviors that are part of early musical skill development and they also develop an emotional connection between parent or caregiver and young child. This is of particular importance as we know that a young child’s strength of memory for learning of any kind depends not only on the quantity of exposure to experiences but also the quality in this case of the emotional context.
So musical activities are commonly used in childcare settings all over the world and are strongly recommended by experts and national guidelines for early learning on a global level. And this is largely because music is a natural framework to address early development according to a review of research on early music instruction, music training programs for caregivers of young children are considered most effective when they include specific ideas for engagement with individual children when they provide a large repertoire of songs and when they emphasize the inclusion of children with special needs.
I want to just say that many of us in the field of communication disorders and sciences have long recognized the benefits of using music to promote and facilitate communication development. But we are finally starting to see some of the research that supports this notion. Recent research into speech learning has proven that the learning of speech for infants as young as nine months is not only supported by speech input, but in fact musical input and that’s defined here as a broader set of patterned auditory stimuli that can also affect an infant’s processing of speech.
In addition, these researchers state that enriched auditory environments beyond enriched language experience may be beneficial to learning. We know that music has the power to be a beautiful tool for learning as well as connection and engagement in musical experiences has the potential to address many of the social aspects of communication, the conception of a musical experience as a shared effective emotion experience as described by researchers, ovary and Molnar & Shekacs in 2009 suggest that when we hear music, we hear the presence or agency of another person whose actions we can interpret, imitate, and predict. Furthermore, we can use musical experiences in a therapeutic or educational context to create a musical, social, playful and imitative environment conducive to learning to take turns, learn to listen, learn to lead, learn to count, learn songs in a new language or simply learn to be together in a group.
So this concludes our literature review. I would like to circle back around and give a little bit more practical ideas and information about using music within everyday routines and with everyday objects. So let’s talk a bit about how thinking familiar tunes can become rituals in and of themselves for you and a child.
One thing I want to mention is that repetition is of course really great for young children. And repetition with variation is a really, really great. One way we can implement that idea is by singing familiar tunes and manipulating the words to make the song about something else. Or by using different types of movements or props to reinforce certain ideas within familiar songs.
So today we’ll sing something that many of us probably already know it’s old MacDonald, but I want to suggest that you try something you might not already have thought about using either photos from a magazine or stuffed animals or animal figurines or peg puzzle pieces or even puppets.
Offer a baby a choice between two animals at a time by holding them up in front of her face about 12 inches away or so based on her gaze. She might linger on one of them based on her gesture. She might reach, grab SWAT at or move toward one or her word or approximation of that word. You’ll reinforce what she communicates to you by singing about that animal. So while lead the song and provide some ideas for what you might say when you do this at home or with a client.
Old McDonald had a farm. EEI. Yeah, young. And on his farm he had a, okay, I’ve got a pig and a cow. Which one should we sing about? Ooh, I see you looking at the pig and now the cow. And now back to the pig. I like how you looked at both of them.
Okay. You’re still looking at that pig. Let’s sing about it. And on his farm he had a pig ee-i-ee-i-o. With an oink here, and an oink there. Here an oink, there an oink, everywhere an oink, oink. Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i ooooh. And on his farm he had… ah, okay. I’ve got a sheep and a duck. Which one should we sing about? Nice. You grabbed straight for the duck and on his farm he had a duck. Ee-i-ee-i-o. With a quack-quack here, and a quack quack there. Here a quack, there a quack, everywhere a quack, quack. Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-o.
And on his farm he had a… alright, here’s a cow and a horse. Which one? This time? I like how you’re looking back and forth. Looks like you aren’t sure, maybe, which one you want. I’ll wait another second. Oh, the horse. I like how you touched it. And on his farm he had a horse. With a neigh here, and a neigh there. Here a neigh, there a neigh, everywhere a neigh, neigh. Old MacDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-o!
So I hope that illustrates a few ways that you can very clearly offer even a very young say from three or four months old or pre-verbal child, some very clear opportunities to make choices. Establishing from very early on both the ways that your infant or toddler can communicate and the ways through the feedback you give about what she’s doing that she is being understood.
Now, a note, young children who are becoming verbal are also going to benefit from visual Aids. Obviously you’re going to use those visual aids with these pictures or objects. So I’d like to just delve in a bit more about routines and rituals. First, I’d like to mention that what we can refer to as caregiving routines are often obviously the most powerful opportunities for learning.
These are the experiences that babies and toddlers have regularly and consistently throughout each and every day. Not only is a baby experiencing and participating in daily routines, she’s also learning about interaction. In addition, she’ll eventually learn to make predictions about what will come next and therefore anticipate transitions between activities more smoothly.
So traditionally we think of these caregiving routines as events like waking up, going to sleep, bathtime eating or nursing or feeding, diaper changes, but even daily routines can become special moments for you and a baby. We know that it’s that social and emotional bond with one or more caregivers that really contributes to a young baby’s development.
I think that it can be really helpful sometimes to think about the fact that even changing your baby’s diaper can be a really stimulating, nurturing rich moment between the two of you. Making these times more distinctive for a child and parent and adding other special moments throughout the day.
To add ritual to one’s life can be incredibly simple things. So you might sing a special song or say a particular phrase during these moments. It could be something you’ve heard or liked or something a family member said to you when you were young. For instance, when your baby wakes up to start the day, you could look out the window and sing a little Diddy about the sun, or you could talk about the weather outside. What’s the weather? What’s the weather? What’s the weather rap today is a cloudy, is it sunny? Is it raining today? Even saying something in a silly voice to prepare her for the next activity like stinky diaper, it’s time for a new one! will provide a consistent cue for your child to learn what comes next. At the same time, creating a unique ritual shared by the two of you. You might also add your own rituals.
These can be things that you do on a daily basis or to Mark special or rare occasions to say celebrate different aspects of various events. Think about what you can do to transition from one part of the daily routine to the next. I find that music can be a really powerful tool in this.
When we introduce songs to mark different parts of our routines, we are using a really cool auditory experience to make associations. For example, when we sang a hello song at the beginning of the episode and we’ll sing a goodbye song at the end. A goodbye song can really help with transitions, for instance. So a little one who doesn’t think she’s ready to get out of the bath might really benefit from additional types of cues than the standard we’re going to get out. And another minute engaging your baby in the process of saying goodbye to all the bath things, making it into a game where you wait for her to point to the next one before you sing to it.
Or simply going around to each item and singing about everyone. Good bye to the duck. Good bye to the water. Good bye to this spout. Goodbye to the shampoos. This allows her to feel like the fun is still happening. Lightening the mood, even though it signals a transition out of her preferred activity. Making a habit of these types of silly interventions in the early days, even before a baby has an opinion, one way or another about it can help keep everybody on track. It may not work every time, but it’s another tool.
So another note here, there is no one way to use music to connect with your little one. There’s no need to sound polished when singing to your child or your client. What is important is the quality of the interaction, the simplicity of being together and reading each other. We muddle language and then we listen and watch asking ourselves about what more we can provide.
So, incorporating music into your interactions can be a wonderful way to provide choice. Making opportunities to practice, making requests to model and reinforce vocabulary to offer opportunities for joint attention and create social routines. So why is this important? Of course, again, when a young child hears vocabulary, for instance in the case about the farm animals and their sounds earlier, or when a young child plays with objects or pictures of animals.
When a young child engages with a caregiver and listens to a familiar song, looks at the caregiver and moves toward the caregiver, etc. And when that young child receives an opportunity to clearly show preference, choosing one card over another, he or she gets to practice many of the precursors to verbal language. It often is not complicated. It’s deceivingly simple. It’s a matter of reading our little ones of offering activities in which they show interest and I’m making small variations to keep them interested.
Now just a couple more real life examples because I can’t help myself. And then if you’d like to hear more, you can always find my album at learnwithles.com/musicforfamilies. That’s one word, or anywhere on Spotify or Amazon music or iTunes.
Okay, so I am going to use one of my favorite baby toys or instruments for this next one. It’s an empty toilet paper roll and I cannot tell you how often I use these with my infant and toddler. They can become garages for matchbox cars, bracelets, stencils, drum mallets shakers, or in this case and microphone.
Using toy microphones is a wonderful way to encourage vocal play or imitation. And they’re great for calling attention to vocal turn-taking. So today I will use my fancy microphone when I call attention to the call and response nature of this next song that I’d like to model for you.
Sings Erie Canal
This is a very classic American traditional work song, but let’s change it a little bit to more appropriately suit our needs. We’ll sing about a baby or a boy or a girl. I’ll sing it once with my friend Theresa’s name and a few of the things she likes to do. You can think of a few things your little one likes to do while we practice.
I know a gal and her name is Teresa. 15 miles on the Erie Canal. She’s a good old worker and a good ol’ pal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal. She likes to read and play all day, laughing all the along the way and every inch of that gal I know – from the top of her head, down to her toes.
Low bridge, everybody down, low bridge for we’re coming to a town, and you’ll always know your neighbor, you’ll always know your pal, if you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal.
Great job guys. So around the 12 to 18 month range is the age when you typically start to hear a child start to utter their first words. As we know, this does not just magically happen overnight. There are a lot of factors that we know go into the healthy and robust development of a young child’s communication even before they verbalize any actual words.
Now one of the big ones of course is that term joint attention being an important part of communication development. Now again, it’s that shared attention between you and your child on some outside thing where you’re both communicating somehow that you’re both interested in that same thing. Another big part of what goes into a child’s developing expressive vocabulary is as you might imagine, their receptive vocabulary.
So the more words your baby has heard you use around him over time and the more opportunities he has to start to learn their meaning, the more he’s able to understand. Now, older babies are playing a lot with their voices as well, and we can think of this focal play as the precursor to speaking words. They’re putting sounds together playing with different consonant vowel combinations, playing with intonation and phrasing. Again, much like singing.
So the more we can make this vocal play into an interactive activity, whether it’s taking turns, babbling, singing, or verbalizing, the more we are encouraging vocal turn-taking, which of course is what conversation is a very silly tool. Like this microphone can be really useful to focus on joint attention and interaction. So let’s get right onto the next song, shall we?
Sings did you ever see a lassie?
Did you ever see a Lassie, Lassie, Lassie? Did you ever see your Lassie go this way and that go this way and that way and that way and this way? Did you ever see a Lassie go this way and that?
Now, if you know a little boy, you might sing about a laddie!
Did you ever see a Laddie, a laddie a laddie? Did you ever see a Laddie go this way and that? Go this way and that way and that way and this way? Did you ever see a Laddie go this way and that?
We might sing about our mommy and daddy a grandparent, but since we all might have a baby to sing about, well, let’s do that.
Did you ever see a baby? A baby? Yeah. Did you ever see a baby go this way and that go this way and that way and that way and this way? Did you ever see a baby go this way and that?
What if instead of seeing that baby, we used another one of our senses. Have you ever heard a baby? A lot of them cry, but they also do and make all kinds of other noises or safe words. What does your baby say? I’ll sing about what my baby’s first word was, but you go ahead and fill in a sound that your baby makes.
Did you ever hear a baby? A baby, a baby? Did you ever hear a baby say banana? Say banana. Banana. Banana, banana. Did you ever hear a baby say banana?
Now the next time you sing this one with your baby or your client, you might pause after you sing “did you ever hear a baby,” say, giving him the chance to respond vocally because even young infants practice turned taking skills.
If he does go ahead and sing about the sound that he made. You might even use your microphone while you sing and then offer it to your little one to indicate that it’s his turn. One of the things you’ll notice I often encourage you to do here at learn with less, both in my podcast and in all of my resources, is to play around with the words or meaning of a familiar song.
One of the reasons I do that is because as I mentioned with regard to routine and rituals, repetition and variation is great for young children and in the context of music, it allows your baby to really process the sounds and patterns of songs and when we changed the words or the rhythm or the emotions we do so within an already familiar context. This highlights different aspects or different elements of an experience and in this way your little one’s brain is working to integrate and distinguish the familiar from the unfamiliar.
One reason why I encourage this type of vocal play is because the more you play with words and language in your voice, the more likely it is that your baby will as well. We know that infants and toddlers are imitative. Even from the very, very beginning. They are looking at our faces, always integrating new information and filing and sorting and storing it for later.
The playful, flexible nature of language within song or rhyme helps us as grownups to really focus on the interaction and helps us get back in touch with that playful part of us from which our young children benefit so much. Another big reason I encourage flexibility and playfulness with language within song is because we don’t always remember the words to those nursery rhymes we once knew as children. I cannot tell you how often I started a rhyme or a tune and then paused realizing I had no idea how the rest of it went.
If we give ourselves a break and allow ourselves to play, we then break free from the confines of our rigid adult selves and start to become more creative. Whether that means taking words out altogether and humming it, tune singing only on la, or replacing all the words with your baby’s name, tapping to the rhythm without the tune or making up an entirely new verse with your own rhyming words.
Give yourself permission and give your family’s permission to let yourself go. Okay, so we’ve spoken about why musical experiences are such valuable learning opportunities, but now we’d like to speak briefly about the value of listening to and making music both with recorded music and the experience of making and listening to live music.
Even very young infants can be given the opportunity to observe differences in instrument sounds and different types of music with variations and rhythm, pitch and tonality.
One of the many reasons this is useful is because exposure to music, especially those songs that vary in the ways I just mentioned, is a natural way to provide the opportunity for young children to hear different kinds of patterns, different types of tonalities, express different character in music that sense that a song sounds joyful, dark, excited, et cetera. Different rhythms express the arrangement of the sounds we hear in songs and give the beat or stress certain parts of the pattern.
Most children’s music in Western culture is in a major tonality, usually sounding upbeat and happy, and many of the songs we associate as kid songs have what’s called a duple meter, referring to the rhythm is having a count of one, two, one, two, one, two, both the hello and goodbye songs we sing during the learn with less episodes are in a major tonality, but the hello song is written in a triple meter: one, two, three one, two, three one, two, three one, two. Hello everybody. Hello everybody. It’s nice to see you here today.
I try to include songs in our repertoire and in the Learn With Less Curriculum that very musically in some way, and I want to encourage you to do the same. This song we are about to sing is an example of a tune in a minor tonality. The words are simply a few randomly chosen nursery rhymes, so you can certainly choose others that fit into the structure. You’ll hear in a moment.
In addition to singing the words, I like to highlight the contrast between words or linguistic content versus simple vocal sounds with no linguistic content. This provides an additional structural element for your baby to hear and make sense of. I’m also going to use my handy empty toilet paper roll to serve as my percussion instrument.
On one side, I’ve attached tissue paper to add to the range of sounds that can make.
Jack and Jill went up the Hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and all the Kings horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Little miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey, along came a spider who sat down beside her and frightened Ms. Muffet away.
Now instead of using nursery rhymes, you can of course fill it in with anything else. Your child’s name or other names, for instance, or personal pronouns.
If you want to take out the element of tonality and focus instead on rhythm, only simply say the words while lightly tapping the beat on your knees or on your baby’s body.
The man on the moon came tumbling down and asked the way to Northridge. He went by the South and burnt his mouth with eating cold peas porridge.
Nursery rhymes are wonderful places to start because they are so naturally rhythmic and they have an added benefit of rhyming, which of course calls attention to several linguistic elements including syntax or grammar. In that the structure of the sentences are lined up with a rhyme scheme to create a pattern.
Another element would be phonology or the study of speech sounds in that the rhyming speech sounds help the child attend to and compare and contrast the sounds at the end of rhyming words. Lastly, prosody or the melody of language is the element that allows us not to sound like robots and gives us pitch like elements in our speech.
Let’s sing another song this time with no particular vocabulary or at least no semantic content to call attention to the other elements like rhyme melody and in this case movement, go ahead and assign a different movement to each segment of this song like patting your hands on your knees and then clapping your hands. And then for the next lifting your arms. I’ll talk about what I’m doing to help you understand as we start.
Sings Ram Sam Sam
So you might notice that there are three segments of this song. I’ll sing it on A, B and C to help you hear them clearly.
On A, I’ll Pat my hands on my knees; on B, I’ll clap my hands and on C, I’ll lift my arms. In fact, I’ll put those orders in.
Now let’s think about three household objects that we might find in our homes. In my living room, I have a couch, a pillow and a table.
I know we all have more than three body parts and I’ll sing about some of my favorites on my son.
Really all you need are three words and the theme, even from a very early age, infants start to visually attend to things in like categories. So grouping items like this within song can really help call attention to these categories. Helping your child organize not only the musical and linguistic elements of what he is hearing, but also classifying or putting like things together.
We’ve talked a lot about the fact that when you sing a song, you need not be afraid to change the lyrics to apply them to your own surroundings because this allows your child to become familiar with the tune and the rhythm and also highlights the difference when you sing with different vocabulary. When we alternate singing and speaking on a rhythm, humming a tune, but taking out the words, adding and taking away hand motion or other movements.
We play with similarities and differences. Comparing and contrasting and focusing on various elements, helping our young children make sense of and enjoy different elements of the interactive experience. Almost every song has a pattern built into its melody. As we saw with the last song we sang together, we see toddlers listening to the pattern of a song when they request to hear the same song over and over and over again.
Before we think to ourselves, Oh my gosh, I can’t take it anymore. Remember, this is how our children learn through repetition by listening, by discriminating. My two year old son recently got to the stage requesting a particular song on repeat. What I find interesting is that sometimes he’ll ask for another particular song to be played directly after the first one and then want to listen to both of those on repeat. This tells me that he is more likely actually comparing and contrasting the structural, rhythmic and linguistic elements of both songs.
When we actively play with the content and pause to wait for a young infant to make a choice with his hands or body like we did with those animal cards or pause to wait for a verbal child to offer a word with or without a visual aid. We help them learn to anticipate those patterns as we are directly placing the words within a sequence which will help form critical early math and early reading skills.
In addition, there’s research suggesting that a small child’s ability to feel and express a steady beat or rhythm is correlated with academic achievement scores in elementary school. I don’t want to focus too much on the idea of getting one’s child into the best schools. I simply mean to reinforce that this play and interaction and silly time that you spend with your tiny person is shaping his entire experience, social, emotional, cognitive, communicative, and even motor development.
These things are all connected to the way our children process and in time perform. All right, so this brings us to the end of our episode today and I just want to thank you so much for being here. You can learn more about learn with less and the podcast and all of the Learn With Less Curriculum at learnwithless.com and if you are interested in learning more about the resources that I have available, the Learn With Less Curriculum is available in many forms.
The first are my bestselling books, Understanding Your Baby and Understanding Your Toddler, which you can learn more about at learnwithless.com/books and if you are interested in becoming a facilitator of the Learn With Less Curriculum and bringing this curriculum to infant and toddler families of all developmental levels in a live and local capacity with your practice, I would love it if you’d let me know.
You can sign up to learn more at learn with less.com/facilitator, and I really look forward to hearing more from you. You can always reach out to get to know and learn more about my work. I’m at ayelet@strengthinwords.com
Now, let’s get ready and we will sing a goodbye song.
Sings Good Bye Song
Thanks so much everybody. Come on over and join the fun at. Learn with less.com and please go ahead and leave a rating or review for the learn with less podcast on Apple podcasts. Thanks so much.
