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Music naturally delights and interests children. An early childhood program that includes time for music and movement provides an outlet for children’s high spirits and creative energy. Music and movement experiences help develop both sides of the brain—an important finding in recent brain research—and contribute to children’s social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development.
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Social/emotional development. Music and movement activities can be shared experiences that make children feel part of a group. Different kinds of music evoke different feelings and actions in children. Lively music can lift children’s spirits and make them want to get up and move their bodies. Quiet, soothing music calms and relaxes children. Children use their bodies to express different kinds of emotions—excitement, anger, sadness. Sharing a song or a dance learned at home helps children to feel good about themselves and their culture. They develop social skills playing musical games requiring simple cooperation such as “Ring Around the Rosy,” or progress to those requiring more complex cooperation such as “Farmer in the Dell.”
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Physical development. Children work on gross motor development (moving to the music and participating in other movement activities) and explore the many ways their bodies can move (finding different ways to get to the other side of a line without stepping on it). Through movement activities (playing “Follow the Leader”), they can improve large muscle skills, balance, and coordination. They strengthen small muscle skills as they learn fingerplays and play musical instruments.
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Cognitive development. Children solve problems while engaged in music and movement activities. They use logic and reasoning to figure out how to make a scarf fly like the wind or which instrument can be used to make a sound like thunder. They create patterns with the words they sing or chant, with the motions they make with their bodies, and with musical instruments. Children learn about number concepts as they clap their hands and stomp their feet four times or as they sing number songs. They think symbolically when they pretend to walk like an elephant or hop like a bunny.
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How Children Engage in Music and Movement
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Children engage in music and movement activities in many different ways. Their style depends, in large part, on their interests, temperament, and experiences.
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Listening. From early infancy, children attend to music and are able to recognize snatches of familiar tunes. With time children get better at noticing variations in musical selections, such as changes in tempo (fast-slow), pitch (high-low), and volume (loud-soft). Older children begin to listen to their own singing or playing with sounds to match the tones of music they have heard.
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Singing. At first, children are able to sing along with others, but not always in time or in tune. Next, they are able to match tones as they sing with others. Then comes the ability to sing alone, and finally, to sing in tune.
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Moving to music. At first, children move to their own beat rather than the beat of the music. It is especially difficult for young children to follow a slow tempo. However, by the age of 3 or 4, they typically can keep time to a regular beat. They begin to adjust their body movements with changes in the music, adapting to contrasts such as slow and fast or light and heavy.
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Playing instruments. In the first stage, children manipulate and experiment with instruments. They become aware of differences related to instrument families (wind, percussion, brass), and they learn to recognize the sounds of each. In the second stage, children use instruments to accompany their movements. Although they may not match the rhythm to their steps, they beat sticks while marching. Next, most children can play a simple percussion or rhythm instrument, keeping the tempo of another instrument or a recording being played simultaneously.
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Imitating/representing movement. Infants can imitate simple movements they see at the moment. They smile back when you smile at them, and when you open your mouth, they do the same. By the second year, most children can reproduce human actions they’ve seen before. Representing the movements of objects is more difficult. For instance, children find it harder to represent the motion of a seesaw, windshield wipers, or a falling feather than to reproduce the motion of someone kicking a ball or washing his or her hands. That ability develops gradually, along with the ability to communicate words or concepts through movement.

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