The Positive Effects of Early Childhood Music Across the Curriculum
When having a trained music educator teaching early childhood music classes and bringing children to their fullest musical ability, these effects will impact the learn- ing across the curriculum. Research shows that music and the brain are often connected when it comes to speech, language, emotional grounding, auditory processing, and sensory integration. Plato once said, “Music is a more po- tent instrument than any other for education.”7
Speech and Language When babies are born, they understand language as
if it were music due to the tonal sounds and rhythmic aspects of language are similar to music. The early child- hood years of ages zero through six are important as chil- dren are learning how to unscramble sounds through lis- tening, speaking, thinking, and eventually, reading, and writing.8
This is one of the reasons that the Too Small to
Fail initiative has formed. In this initiative, pediatricians prescribe new parents to “talk, read, sing, play, and bond with their babies from birth” because this encourages a baby’s brain and language development. Research has shown that almost 60 percent of children in the United States start kindergarten unprepared, lagging behind their peers in critical language and reading skills.9
Music has a great impact on learning a language
throughout all ages. When congresswoman Gabrielle Gif- fords was injured in 2011, it resulted in a significant brain injury that led to aphasia, a neurological condition that affects speech. Giffords relearned how to speak through music therapy. Meaghan Morrow, a music therapist and certified brain injury specialist, used treatments that in- cluded melodic intonation therapy. Through the power of neuroplasticity and music therapy, music helped re- train Giffords’s brain’s pathways to access language and be able to speak again.10
Language and reading skills have also been linked to the ability to keep a steady beat. In Dr. Feierabend’s First Steps in Music approach to teaching music to children ages 0-7, music educators strive to help their students be- come tuneful, beatful, and artful. This means that music teachers consider the thirty-year plan when teaching their students so that when they grow up, they can sing Happy
JANUARY 2021
Birthday (tuneful), they can dance at their child’s wed- ding (beatful), and express sensitivity when listening to music (artful).11
Through his infant curriculum, teachers
are helping the parents and infants bounce, clap, tap, and experience the steady beat together. By the age of three, when the children are in music class without their parents, they can maintain the steady beat. His approach is based in research of how children learn. Therefore, he connects learning music with how the brain processes sounds and tones.
Keeping a steady beat at such a young age is impor- tant for the developing brain. The study conducted by Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory found biological evidence linking the ability to keep a beat to the neural encoding of speech sounds. The association of beat keeping and reading has a possible common founda- tion in the auditory system. They conclude that it may be that the rhythmic skills exercise the auditory system leading to strong sound-to-meaning associations that are important when learning to read.12
Emotional Grounding, Auditory Processing, and Sensory Integration
A brain’s corpus callosum is the connection between
the two cerebral parts of the brain, transmitting neural messages between both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The corpus callosum has been called the “Su- perhighway for Learning” because if the two hemispheres are not talking to each other, a child could struggle with learning challenges, such as speech delays, social emo- tional learning, attention and focus issues, and lack of communication. For this reason, it is beneficial for chil- dren in the early childhood years to participate in “cross the midline” activities to exercise the communication between the two hemispheres. These activities focus on movements that cross the midlines of left to right, top to bottom, front to back, and vice versa.7
Cross the midline activities can be performed with
infants. By having the caregiver perform simple nursery rhymes and finger plays with their child, they can encour- age the midline activities. An example is performing the popular nursery rhyme, “This Little Piggy”. The caregiver is inclined to perform the rhyme using the baby’s fingers or toes that are on the same side as them. For example, if the baby is lying down, the caregiver might begin the
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