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Musical Connections: Preschool Development and Music
Every child can learn and grow through music, each in his or her own way. Here are some guidelines and suggestions that can help develop your preschoolers’ language and emergent literacy, cognitive, creative, motor, and social skills.
Music Experiences That Promote Learning
- Singing favorite songs often to develop language and emergent literacy skills and strengthen memory.
- Making up songs, repeating rhymes and finger plays, and singing with puppets and toy animals to explore books and develop language skills.
- Listening to, comparing, and responding to various kinds of music to develop thinking skills.
- Repeating patterns and counting beats when clapping, playing, or listening to instruments to develop math and literacy skills.
- Using music and movement to represent people, things, and feelings to develop self-expression and motor skills.
- Dancing, clapping, and moving creatively to music to develop motor skills, body awareness, and spatial concepts.
- Engage in group musical activities such as group songs, games, or dances to encourage social and motor skills.
- Listening to and exploring diverse kinds of music and instruments from different cultures to develop social awareness.
Some Things Preschoolers Can Do
- Use language and more complex sentences to express their own ideas and feelings.
- Create their own stories and songs.
- Play with words in rhymes and use humor.
- Develop ability to compare and contrast likenesses and differences.
- Begin to recognize and copy simple patterns.
- Use their imagination and express themselves in a variety of creative ways.
- Run, jump, hop and move with control and rhythm as they play and explore their world.
- Develop a sense of direction and become more aware of their own and other people’s movement in space.
- Follow directions and play simple games with rules.
- Develop social skills and manners for relating to one another and a group.
- Begin to understand culture and diversity.
Things Adults and Children Can Do Together
- Make singing, music making and listening to all types of music part of daily routines.
- Make up new words to favorite songs, or sing familiar songs in different languages.
- Imitate melodic or other musical sounds together that are part of children’s everyday world.
- Use simple rhythm instruments to explore music making and to copy one another’s beat and patterns.
- Using different colors and materials draw or make artwork while listening to music.
- Make simple instruments using empty containers for drums or fill small containers with rice or beans to create shakers.
- Act out favorite stories or poems that have been set to music or songs that have been made into story books, and insert songs into favorite storybooks.
- Discover different ways to move and respond to music.
- Attend musical events together that represent different cultures and their musical expressions and traditions.
- Take children to a local music store where they can see and experiment with different instruments.
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