10 Early Childhood Skills Developed Through Song
Singing is an essential part of yoga classes for babies and toddlers. It doesn’t matter how well you sing, what you sing, or why you sing — singing teaches young children important lessons. Here are 10 skills little ones learn when we sing to them!
Trust: Most parents sing to their babies. In this way, babies learn that singing connotes closeness and caretaking. When you sing in your early childhood classes, little ones hear, “I am another person who cares for you.” This promotes cooperation and a healthy classroom culture.
Transitions: It’s something your might not consciously notice, but transitions on TV are almost always cued with music. There’s the intro music, the fade-between-scenes music, the transition-into-new-material music, and of course the outro music. Beyond television, most children in early childhood experience music and/or singing during transitions — for example, a mother may hum to her baby while nursing before nap. Or a grandparent may sing a song while tiptoeing out of a child’s bedroom at night. Consider the important junctures in your children’s yoga class and come up with a “theme song” for each part. For example, you might incorporate: a welcome song, a breath song, a movement song, a storytime song, and a goodbye song.
Cooperation: Music is perhaps the best example of cooperation on the planet. Every instrument plays its part at a specific time, tempo, and volume. If one person sings too loud or bangs the drums too softly, it throws everything off. In your early childhood classes, bring instruments! Invite children to explore the practice of making music that sounds good together. Play loud, play quiet, play all at once, play one at a time! Show kids that cooperation is more than just following directions: its sensing harmony and experiencing flow.
Name Recognition: Many toddlers know their name, but struggle to speak or understand other names beyond their immediate circle. When kiddos go to school, this can become especially challenging when kids must suddenly learn names of other children — including those outside of their culture. By singing names, children can learn the structures and sounds of words, as well as proper intonation. Imagine a class with a Jamie (jay-me) and a Jaime (hai-meh). Sing these two names out loud and notice the way different muscles activate, the way breath extends, and the way the mouth and tongue shape the letters. This method of learning yields faster and more lasting results than simply repeating spoken names day after day.
Active Listening: When you love a song, you learn its words. But if the song moves fast, cycles through complex rhyme structures, incorporates slant verse, or relies on metaphorical language, what do you do? You listen to it over and over. You pause, you rewind, you play it back. In other words, you listen for comprehension. This model of active listening encourages young children to “tune in” — engaging not only their auditory cortex but also the center of reasoning: the prefrontal cortex.
Rhythm: Singing teaches children concepts that are often too esoteric to explain. You could tell a group of 2-year-olds that rhythm is “the systematic arrangement of musical sounds, principally according to duration and periodic stress” — but you will be met with blank stares (or rolling around). Music teaches rhythm in an embodied way. Here’s what we suggest: Make a playlist featuring up-tempo and down-tempo songs, invite the students to either dance or finger paint along with the music and point out how the music moves them — this is rhythm.
Rhyme: Early literacy skills begin with language and listening skills. To this end, a foundational skill is recognizing sound patterns, and especially short-vowel patterns. So sing your favorite rhyming book! Play a guessing game where you sing a line and leave the last rhyming word out. Want to test your students’ sense of rhyming? Play the song “In Summer” by Olaf in Frozen. When it gets to the line, “Winter's a good time to stay in and cuddle / But put me in summer and I'll be a —“ Pause the song, read the line one more time, and ask your students, what should Olaf say instead? It’s not “A happy snowman” as Olaf says. (The answer is of course, puddle!) Most young children will not get this, but it’s an insightful exercise for gauging the developmental milestone of sound-pattern recognition.
Vocabulary Acquisition: Can you imagine learning the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” via a worksheet? Or just by reading it in a storybook? No way! Singing is a fantastic way to teach children new and complex vocabulary in a way that will stick. Begin with something simple, like “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” and once the kids have successfully learned their basic body parts, swap in some new terms: “Cranium, Clavicle, Patella, Tarsals” YES — young children can learn these words, and singing is the way to teach them!
Language Comprehension: Because songs typically follow the structure and grammatical patterns of language, they offer an implicit model for language acquisition. Many children in multilingual homes move between languages via song — learning a tune in one language, then another language, and perhaps another. This practice teaches rules of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation. In your children’s yoga classes, you can follow this same model. For example, use opening bars of “The Chimes of Vendôme” to sing the five Yama (in Sanskrit): Ahimsa, Satya, Asteya, Brahmacharya, Aparigraha. Then, repeat the tune in your own language.
Emotional Intelligence: When students are exposed to multiple styles of music and singing, they gain a sense of how music is categorized and created — in other words, they gain a sense of genre. This connects to emotional intelligence because musical genres broadly mirror many of our physiological states. Soft instrumental music mimics a slow, stable heart rate, extended exhales, and stable blood pressure (aka, a feeling of calm). Rock music mimics a racing heart rate, short and sharp breaths, and high blood pressure (aka, intense emotions like anger and frustration). By bringing music and singing into the classroom, you can help kids read emotions, recognize the physiology connected to them, and choose or create music that regulates or responds to emotions.