Children Learning Through Music 6 Reasons Why Music is Essential in Childcare

Why music matters: six reasons why music is essential in childcare
Music is a fantastic learning tool for children, and one that they can benefit from at any age. It helps strengthen several areas of development, from creativity to language, and can hone important motor and memory skills too.
Consequently, it’s essential to routinely incorporate music into any learning environment wherever possible. Here are six reasons why music matters in childcare.
It helps children learn to express themselves
Listening and dancing to music — particularly upbeat music — gives children the opportunity to freely move and express themselves. Playing musical instruments can also greatly stimulate a child’s creativity, while older children can exercise their decision-making skills by making up their own songs. At Creative Childcare, our specialist educators lead children through a range of musical activities that help them build upon their natural instincts. Our music sessions give children a safe, encouraging, and fun outlet to express themselves and explore new ideas and movements.
It can improve a child’s social skills
The Creative Childcare Music program brings little ones together in a sociable setting where the emphasis is on learning while having fun together. Regardless of whether a child is a verbal or non-verbal communicator, there is scope for everyone to feel part of this shared musical experience.
Listening and dancing to music, as well as making it, can help children develop positive social skills in their interaction with others. Our group sessions help them build friendships and also encourage them to exercise self-control as they listen or watch music being made by others. Listening to diverse musical styles from a range of countries and in a variety of languages, meanwhile, can teach children to respect other cultures too.
It helps build language, literacy, and communication skills
Listening to songs from an early age helps children to learn both the sounds and meaning of words. As children become familiar with the rhythms, sounds, and rhymes of the lyrics, it lays crucial foundations for reading and writing.
Singing also helps to broaden a child’s vocabulary. The educational songs featured in our Creative Childcare Music program, for example, deliver a wealth of valuable information across a range of topics, from animals to the weather. These musical sessions are great for building a child’s listening skills as well.
It can hone motor skills
Moving to music can strengthen both gross and fine motor skills and develop a child’s co-ordination. Performing music, in particular, which commonly requires practising unique finger and arm movements, can help strengthen these essential skills. When children dance to a song or perform set actions and movements as part of our Creative Music program, they get to improve their physical and muscle memory.
Musical or dance performance also strengthens a child’s mental-physical connection, encouraging the mind and body to work together.
It aids concentration and improves memory
Even adults use music to aid memory — facts and figures are easier to remember when they’re put to music or used in a rhyme. Similarly, these catchy musical elements can be a very powerful tool in helping children to memorise and recall educational information — much more so than when concepts are learned by verbal instruction.
Actively engaging in music can also help develop attention, concentration, and executive function. Additionally, music is a fun way to learn — one that many children find less stressful than traditional educational settings.
It can stimulate mathematical thinking
Introducing children to songs and different musical components can help teach them maths too. That’s because music stimulates the part of a child’s brain that’s responsible for spatial-temporal reasoning — a skill essential to maths. Performing music, in particular, reinforces this part of the brain, possibly because it involves creating patterns and — in the case of reading music — some arithmetic. It’s essential to helping children develop elements of reasoning, such as logic and repetition.
At Creative Childcare, we believe in creating a rich musical environment in which children can develop their social-emotional, motor, and language skills and practise self-expression whilst having fun at the same time. To find out more about our creative music sessions, please call 1300 002 929,
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