We LOVE adding music into our daily routines! Not only do the teachers love it, but the children LOVE to make up their own music and express themselves. Integrating music throughout the day can help young children develop important skills typically outlined in states’ early learning standards, including the following:
- Executive function
- Self-regulation
- Listening and speaking
- Gross-motor skills
- Comparing and contrasting
- Creative thinking and expression
Here are a few different ways that we add music into our daily routines at The Learning Tree. Although these are ways we use music in our classrooms, we believe that these can also be utilized at home during your daily routines with your children! Or even give you ideas to get creative with different parts of your days or with different materials you may have at home.
CLEANUP TIME
- Ask children to clean up while music is playing and to freeze when the music stops. Repeat this activity during cleanup time and count how many times it takes to clean/stop before the children have finished cleaning up.
SMALL GROUP TIME
- Have children paint while listening to fast and slow songs and compare how they may paint differently depending on the music.
- Ask children to think about how the music makes them feel and have them draw how they feel or think.
WORK TIME
- Children may choose to create a series of movements and/or dances to a particular song on their own.
- Children may choose to create words to a particular song on their own.