Using song to support your teaching/parenting helps make information you're presenting more meaningful and relevant to children.

Use faster music (140 - 160 beats per minute) to energize, increasing heart rate and bringing more oxygen to the brain.

Use song even as just a background/subliminal experience to aid in the development of effective communication skills, through familiarity of language patterns, exploration of expressive language (communicating ideas, feelings and needs), and the building of vocabulary and terminology appropriate to the child's needs.

Children 0 - 8 years of age are primarily kinesthetic learners. Use songs affording fine-motor opportunities (fingerplays, hand signs, etc.). Fun, repetitive motivating songs can provide plenty of early literacy extensions, e.g., copying/printing opportunities, shared reading of choruses, sentence/word puzzles. For Example cut up choruses into sentences and, later, sentences into individual words. Mix up the sentences/words and have children reassemble them in proper order.

Use music to strengthen learning by “touching the emotions”. Music is stored in our long-term memory. Whatever we learn through music, we remember it better and believe it more deeply --especially when it touches our emotions.

Build the brain -- expose pre-school children to plenty of music to help thicken the neural pathway bridge (corpus collosum) between left and right hemisphere. ongs provide a novel way of learning -- the brain likes novelty!

For a full reprint of this informative article by award-winning artist and educator, RONNO, please contact Kimbo