The Power of Music with Family Time

Written By:Diana Davidson and Daveen DiGiacomo, Music Together Center Directors

Musicians and singers gathered on balconies in Italy playing together from afar. A pianist playing in a moving pickup truck serenading his neighborhood in New Orleans. Singers using the Acapella App to harmonize with other singers across the country while stuck at home. These are some of the viral images we saw when the pandemic first hit earlier this year. Everyone paused. Everything stopped and everything got canceled. However one thing became apparent, music was not canceled. Musicians just had to get creative, especially music teachers. We learned how to zoom. We learned to light ourselves from behind the camera. We became experts on mics and webcams. And most importantly, we found a way to keep families connected and the music going virtually. We kept our families with young children engaged and excited about making music at home through interactive music classes, all from the comfort of our living room turned music classroom. Families for the first time ever were experiencing extreme isolation as they had never before and hungry for connection. We just had to find new ways to gather and create a new kind of music-making community.

The experience of sharing music together and actively engaging in music creates fun quality family time and can support your children’s overall development. Singing, dancing, moving and playing with music can foster your child’s learning in multiple ways. Not only does it enhance their music learning, it also supports their social, emotional, physical, kinesthetic, cognitive and language development as well. These music and movement activities become a natural teaching tool that families can use to support their child’s growth across many domains.

Social and Emotional Development

When a child engages with music, they are nurturing their self-expression and self confidence, giving them a language to identify a range of emotions like joy, sadness, anger, excitement, and everything in between. A well known silly song sung to children about a very determined arachnid climbing up a water spout can actually be a vehicle for children to recognize expressions and emotions in others and themselves. Think about changing the lyrics of Eensy Weensy Spider to the Very Happy, Sad, or Angry Spider instead while applying facial expressions, intonation, and dramatic play. This experience can provide a developmentally appropriate way to recognize expressions and emotions in others while promoting empathy. Since children are natural improvisors, they will often offer their own lyric substitutions, showing creativity, leadership and group participation.

Physical & Kinesthetic Learning

Before some of us learned to play a musical instrument, we learned to play our primary instrument first. Our bodies. In early childhood, music is experienced through the voice and through the body with creative movement, which encompasses a tremendous amount of skill building, supporting physical and kinesthetic learning.

Let’s go back to our spider friend! Are you picturing the hand motions that go with the song? The spider fingers crawling up, the rain coming down, and the sun coming out? Now what if you made them into dancing spiders, bouncing spiders, stretching spiders, twisting spiders, jumping spiders, tip-toeing spiders, backwards walking spiders? In addition to helping a child’s fine and gross motor development, this gives them the opportunity to practice different ways to move and negotiate the space they are in. Using a simple song as a conductor for these movement activities supports their bilateral coordination by using both sides of the body and everyday locomotor and non-locomotor skills. Many children are natural kinesthetic learners and need to move in order to learn and better process information. They need to feel the music from their head, to their toes and across their little fingertips in order for learning to happen.

Cognitive Skills

We know that there are many connections made between math and music, but did you know informal music making can support growth in other areas related to cognitive knowledge like logic, reasoning and cause-effect? When the spider climbed up the water spout and it started to rain, what happened next? It “washed the spider out” of course. Children may even start to categorize and predict the pattern of this song, while using that information to compare and contrast patterns or irregularities they find in the world around them which is an important cognitive milestone for young children to develop.

Language and Literacy Skills

I had a student with learning disabilities whose speech was delayed. One day his mom came into class very excited. Her son had finally said his first words, which were Moo and Caw. Those words happened to be part of a song we were currently singing in class, which the parents were reinforcing at home. Music has a way of unlocking that language door.

Every week after that, he continued to progress with new words and new sounds, not just musically but in every aspect of his daily life. When children first start to explore their voices and start singing, they learn how to coordinate their breathing, which involves rhythm of speech, intonation, expression and inflection. Identifying rhymes and beginning and end sounds creates phonetic awareness and can help support children with spoken language, reading and writing skills. Like the English language, music is also written and read from left to right.

When children follow a piece of music, they apply the same tracking discipline and skill to reading. Children not only make associations between letters and sounds, they begin to match the printed lyrics to what they are singing.

Music Development On top of all these strata of skills brings us to the actual music learning itself. Before a child can play music, they need to learn to play with it first! Early childhood exposure to music from different countries, cultures, languages, time signatures and tonalities allow children to develop a very keen ear early on. On a train ride from Madrid to Sevilla, I observed a family with young children make the time go faster by breaking out with live flamenco music and dancing with only their hands to clap and their voices to sing. If you know anything about flamenco music, it’s made up of very complex meters. I was amazed at how their toddlers picked up those rhythms so naturally while singing and clapping with their parents, while I struggled to find the downbeat. This comes down to exposure and immersion. Just like the cognitive advantage young children have in learning new languages, they also have an advantage for learning different kinds of music they normally would not be exposed to.

Eventually every child can achieve basic music competence by singing in tune, keeping a beat and learning to participate with confidence through music. Those basic skills are paramount to learning an instrument, taking voice or dance lessons, singing in a choir, or simply just clapping along to flamenco dancers on a train in Spain.

While we’ve had to press pause on so many things this year, the music continues on in our living rooms, our kitchens, our bedrooms, our cars, our yards and in our daily lives. Whether in person or online, we can assure you as music teachers, we are just the beginning point of your child’s musical learning. Keeping the music alive at home has always been the end point.

Website: Songbirds Music

Website: Blossom Music Tree

If you are interested in events and M.O.M ongoings, please subscribe to our parenting newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Instagram.