Music education for young children

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Music education for young children is an educational program introducing children in a playful manner to singing, speech, music, motion and organology. It is a subarea of music education. There are classes for diverse age brackets, starting with children as young as three months.

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[edit] Purpose

Getting started early on with music can be a great benefit to everybody. Students already have a lot of musical knowledge when entering a later stage of musical education. A large number of famous musicians have grown up with music, for example Mozart, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera. Music can also be a form of psychotherapy for adults and children. It is highly important to gain as much musical experience as early as possible for anybody who wants to learn music.

[edit] Forms and activities

Music education for young children is offered by institutions as divers as music schools, some local brass bands and others. In Germany, there is usually one weekly session lasting 45 minutes. Participants may sing songs, look at and try out musical instruments, try some dancing motions and more. The atmosphere is usually casual and playful. Activities:

  • Listening: Quizzes with tapes or CDs, for example guessing sounds or voices or identify instruments in an orchestra
  • Motion: free dancing motions to music as well as more formal dances (polonaise, round dances, dancing with a partner), imitation (with one child demonstrating certain motions)
  • Fine motor skills: Finger games, foot exercises (toe, heel, instep etc.), wrist exercises
  • Instruments: looking at, describing, materials, sound, identify, try oneself
  • Rhythm: Rhythmical clapping exercises, imitation with hands, feet and body, Orff instruments
  • Singing: Singing songs (with the mouth opened in different ways), learning new songs
  • Reacting: starting or stopping on different Signals
  • Meditation: being quiet, becoming quiet, being able to listen (whispering, mouth movement)
  • Social behavior: developing ways to deal with each other, reacting to each other, being creative together
  • Music genres: Getting to know different genres and their instruments, foreign countries and music, setting music to stories with instruments and sounds
  • Field trips: Church organ, luthier, piano maker, brass instrument maker, music store, recording studio etc.

[edit] Organized Methods of early childhood music education

Several international organizations exist which promote specific methods of training young children in music. Kindermusik, Music Together, and the Suzuki Method are among the most widely recognized of these methods. Kindermusik is a music and movement program of classes designed to be taken from birth until a child is 7 years old. Music Together is also a set of music and movement classes. The Suzuki method is notably different in that it focuses on learning a specific instrument like the violin, and it uses this focus to foster musical ability and appreciation. RITMìA[1] is an innovative form of music education conceptualised by Sonia Simonazzi, an Italian bassoon player, whose aim is give a deeper, richer significance to music instruction by integrating sound stimulation with body movements and yoga.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • Campell, Don (2000). The Mozart Effect for Children. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc..
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