Preschoolers are overflowing with creativity, and making music with them is so much fun. When picking activities for your 3- or 4-year-old, a music class is a great choice. Regular exposure to a musically rich environment fosters your child's music skills as well as growth and development in many other areas essential to success in school and life. A Music Together class in Decatur is the perfect place for preschoolers to imagine, improvise, express their creativity, and relate to others through music. Witness the true magic of making music with your preschooler at one of our music classes!

The Importance of Play:

You may have heard it said that children teach themselves through play. But play is not all about having fun. Play is the primary method young children use to learn and grow physically, emotionally, cognitively, socially, and morally. And when they play with music, they can also learn the complex skills of singing in tune and accurately expressing rhythm in their bodies.

Song and Word Play:

When we make up verses and sing about daily routines, we’re helping both our children and ourselves. Using music and singing about things like putting on shoes or brushing teeth can actually make parenting a little easier! We give verbal instructions to children all day long. When we shift to singing about what to do instead of speaking, children often pay attention in a different way (and music can lighten the mood, too!). This is why the best preschool teachers sing about lining up and cleaning up—it just works! When we make up verses to songs or come up with different ways to move, we’re improvising! Some performers find improvising scary, but in reality, improvisation is just creating a new way of making music in the moment – and we do that in class all the time! When we play with music in this way, we’re modeling using creative thinking to make the music our own.

Movement Play:

Our classes are full of movement. Research has shown that before young children can audiate rhythm, they need to experience rhythm through movement. The children will explore and experiment in their own ways as the grownups give them a visual representation of the beat and the phrasing to support their learning.

Dancing as a group can also be a powerful tool for children as they develop social awareness during the preschool years. Collective movement fosters interaction and cooperation and helps children to understand themselves in relation to others. In addition, movement experiences give children the opportunity to develop non-verbal forms of communication as they navigate group dynamics.

Instrument Play:

For the first 30 minutes of class, your teacher will lead you and your preschooler through songs and dances, guiding and orchestrating the development of each song. During this time, the children are deeply involved in receiving information (observing, processing, and imitating). After this period of “collecting data”, you and your child will have a chance to experiment with instruments (during the play-along time) without being led by your teacher, which is necessary for their musical development. In our culture, most children don’t get a chance to observe their important caregivers making music and just jamming for fun. That’s what the play-along is all about! And here’s why it’s so important that you play along: your preschooler will learn something from you that they can’t learn from anyone else. While they can learn skills from any teacher, they develop the disposition to make music and a love for making music from you.

Why Is My Preschooler Not Participating?

If your child is 2½ to 4 years old, you may notice that they are not actively participating in class. Your preschooler may be recognizing the difference in the way they sing or move compared with the way the adults in class sing or move. Your child may want to observe without participating in order to take in more information and study “how things work.” So while it may look on the surface as though they lack interest in music class, their careful observation may be an important developmental step in their musical growth. We encourage you to honor this phase of learning and allow them the space to watch and listen.

When will my child be ready to learn an instrument?

Before children are ready to learn an instrument they need ample time to play with their primary instruments— their voices and bodies. Basic Music Competence— the ability to sing in tune and keep a steady beat— is the most important readiness sign to look for. You can support your children in developing Basic Music Competence by singing and dancing with them as much as possible! Give them lots of exposure to music and music-making and lots of time to play around with music in whatever way they want. There will be plenty of time for piano lessons when they get older— for now the most important thing you can do is PLAY!

"I love the program. The music alone is sophisticated and diverse - it's so good for children to hear and learn these types of songs. I teach my daughter piano myself and [Music Together] supports all I am doing, plus gives her a solid foundation in the whole music experience; singing, movement, rhythm and early theory." - Music Together Parent

"I'm a piano teacher and this feels so right to me. It's building musicians first, rather than teaching a single instrument first. It's the magic of doing vs hearing. The play-based approach, the internalizing of the concepts by repetitive, fun, social music making is key!" - Music Together Teacher

Read More About Music Lessons and the Very Young Child from Beth Kelley Gillogly, Director of Sierra Foothills Music Together

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