Any music teacher can tell you that children love repetition. It’s how we learn. Who knew that we all liked to be so lazy, though? I guess I better go write my hit song!
singing
Musical Dialogue
Girls Hand Clapping. Licensed under Creative Commons.
Yesterday I posted about how making music together was great for social learning. Music is inherently social, but there are ways to make the music itself social! So, here’s the challenge: have an exclusively musical dialogue with your little music-makers!
Just a warning: some children will rebel against this idea, so it may take many attempts to get them used to the idea of conversing with you musically. Find the way they are most comfortable expressing themselves musically. For one child that may be through movement and dance, another with instruments, another with chanting, and yet another with singing. Keep at it until you find what works. This is a great exercise in working around individual differences, a skill that is useful for all those early childhood battles, like potty training.
You can use this rhyme from the James T. Callow Folklore Archive, which has been modified for this purpose.
My mother, your mother
Lives across the way
Every night they have a chat
And this is what they say*
After the introduction rhythm, you can make up a chant, a rhyme, or melody and then the child can respond. Often, children will mimic exactly what you do, which is ok. Encourage them to make up something different. You’ll find as they grow older they have more musical ideas to choose from.
In my experience, sometimes children will refuse to respond “musically” -probably out of discomfort or embarrassment- but I have yet to see a child (or adult!) give a musical response that was inappropriate. For instance, in the audio examples above, I’ll chant the rhyme in its original duple (think “in two,” like a march) meter, then in triple (think “in three,” like a waltz). Once the meter is established, a child with enough musical experience in duple or triple will tend to stick with the meter provided. Their response may be longer or shorter than yours, and that’s ok, too.
You can be creative and change the words to suit musical movement instead of dialogue, with “every night they hang their clothes and this is what they do.” Instrumental improvisation, with “have a jam,” or even silly improvisation with “my doggy, your doggy…” You could go so far as to try to sing it in different tonalities, also. The possibilities are endless.
Let me know how your musical dialogue goes and how you found how your little ones were most comfortable improvising!
*I first came across this rhyme used to start improvisation at a workshop given by Wendy Valerio, so credit goes to her for the original idea! It’s just too good not to share!
If you’re teaching my kid piano (drums, violin, etc), why are you singing so much?
I often get asked about all the singing that my students do in their piano lessons, so I thought I’d write a quick response so that while your child might be learning an instrument, you know why they spend so much time singing. This will also help you guide them in their lessons.
The voice is our first instrument. We use it to express ideas, but first we used it to express feelings, and then music. Our voice is something that we internalize and becomes part of our thinking process. You read things in your own voice in your head most of the time. Young children often read aloud and some whisper to themselves or mouth the words for a long time before they learn to read silently. This silent reading is called audiating, and we do it when we read music, too.
Audiating is important to word reading and music reading, but it is very difficult to measure. So, how do I know that my students are internalizing the music on the page? I have them sing. If they can sing it, they can play it. However, with any new skill, especially one as complex as music-making, they may not be able to physically do it at first. If they can sing it perfectly, but not play it perfectly, I’ve narrowed down where they problem may lie. More than that, though, it is turning them into better musicians. They need to develop rhythm, melody, and tonal fluency and literacy in order to translate those skills into competent and expressive piano playing.
So, take your child’s singing homework (which all of my students have, as well as piano homework) seriously. Sing with them, listen to them, give them feedback. Help them check on the piano that they started and ended on the same pitch. Sing in the car, while you do chores, or walk around the neighborhood and sing those songs and patterns they are learning in their lessons. Sing their piano piece when they can’t practice at the piano. Your child will be a better student and a better musician for it!
Chime in- how do you help your child with their lesson assignments?
My Child Won’t Sing…
Every child has preferred ways of expressing their musicality. My son’s happens to be with lots and lots of volume…
As a parent, we have a desire to know how well our children are meeting certain developmental milestones. New parents are going to check reference books and the internet to see what their child should be doing and when. Often parents worry about their child’s musicality. Just like other developmental milestones, musical milestones vary with each child, and sometimes the variance is even greater than with motor or linguistic milestones. A lot of this is because our culture doesn’t emphasize music the way many other cultures do, so children are simply getting less practice. Another factor is that sometimes we just can’t see what our child understands. If you are reading this blog and care about your child’s musical development, it is almost certain you had little to do with any delayed development. You can go to this PBS site to check out musical milestones.
However, this post isn’t really about milestones. What if a child can’t, doesn’t, or won’t sing? My son, the elder of my two children, obviously loved music from a young age, but he was well past two by the time he did anything that resembled singing. As a music teacher, I felt troubled by this. Didn’t I sing enough to him? He certainly got enough music in utero, as I was singing as an elementary music teacher, all day, every day until his birth. Now, he certainly does sing, but he has developed an insecurity around singing. Maybe he feels that because it takes him a long time to learn songs (especially the words) that he isn’t good at it. In fact, he’s said so. Hearing “mama, I’m not a good singer,” is heart-breaking. If you’re dealing with something similar (maybe your child asks you to stop singing, only sings when he doesn’t think someone is listening, or doesn’t sing at all, but loves dancing to music), I don’t have any magic answers for you, but I have some suggestions.
- Figure out how your child likes to be sung to. Maybe they don’t want “background noise,” but want to be sung to, face-to-face. Maybe face-to-face is too much for an introverted child, but they will join in to music that is around. You may want to catch their singing on camera, but while some children will jump at the chance to perform, others will shrink from it.
- Take out words, or slow them down. Putting words and music together is challenging, and not that natural for some children. My son often complains he doesn’t know the songs at class, but comes home and sings the melody without words or with made-up words. Sing with vocables (la, ba, doo, etc.) to make the child focus on the music instead of the words.)
- Repetition, Repetition, Repetition. Variety is the spice of life, and you should sing many different songs, but children often take several repetitions in a row to become comfortable with a song and start to understand it. Even when it’s a song that they “know,” it might take several play-throughs for them to join in. This is why your child always shouts “again!”
- Embrace Silence. Children need quiet time, just like adults. Our brains need a break to process everything they absorb. On a larger level, have time without you singing or listening to music, or TV. During your child’s quiet play by themselves, you might hear echos of songs you sung earlier that day or that week. You may even hear them make their first improvisations. On a smaller scale, pause between lines of a song for them to catch up or repeat what you just sang. For very familiar songs, slow down toward the end of the line of music and omit the last word or two for them to fill in, i.e. “Rockabye baby, on the… tree top, when the wind… blows, the cradle will… rock.“
Try these tips, or you find more tips at How to Sing with Toddlers ‘The Hanen Way’
Please comment: What got your little one to start singing if they were reluctant?
Make Music Everyday 