Music is a fun way to develop your child’s listening and patterning skills
Modern scanning technology is improving all the time. Since the early 2000’s this has facilitated huge leaps in our understanding of human brain development.
Researchers often choose music as a stimulus to observe brain function since music processing involves nearly every area of the brain.
As a result, researchers are understanding a lot more – not just about the way we learn, but about the effects of music in particular.
When playing and listening to music, our brains are automatically contrasting, comparing and recognizing patterns to make sense of the sounds, and it is thought that exposure to this activity must have beneficial effects on many other skill areas – especially reading and writing.
It doesn’t seem to matter what particular music it is – all music has this effect!
Many of the problems that children can encounter when learning to read occur because of a difficulty in recognising phonemes = hearing the tiny differences in the sounds that make up individual words.
Music can really help children to learn how to listen – differentiating between loud and quiet, high and low notes, fast and slow, bumpy and smooth passages, as well as recognizing the tone of different instruments.
- What sort of music do you listen to at home?
- Do you Dance at home?
- Do you have favourite songs or rhymes that you remember from your own childhood?
- Share your own favourite music with your child at home – pop, rock, classical, rap, funk, jazz. It doesn’t matter what type of music it is.
- If you like it and show your enthusiasm… your child will like it too!
- Talk about the music, tell them why you like it, clap along, dance and move to the music, encourage their curiosity – it’s all valuable learning!
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