Recently NickJr.com spoke with Laurie Berkner, the award-winning musician featured on Noggin's "Move to the Music" and Jack's Big Music Show about how parents can incorporate music and movement into their preschooler's day.
Here are her 5 simple suggestions
Color to the Music
Get out crayons, colored markers, and paper and set them on the floor. Turn on some music, get down on the floor together, and listen with your child for a few moments. Talk with your child about how the music makes you feel and ask your child what she thinks of when she hears the music. Then, start coloring while listening. When you're done, ask your child to tell you about what she drew. Try a variety of different musical styles, and then compare the pictures. Talk about the different subjects, the different colors, and the lighter and darker parts of the pictures. This is a great way to introduce children to music, and it may help your child express unspoken feelings and thoughts.
Sing-Away Separation Anxiety
Try this activity to help ease separations such as your leaving for work or your child going off to preschool, to kindergarten, or even to Grandma's house. Try associating a happy song you can sing together before the separation each day. Pick a song together and make up a silly dance to go with it. If you get in the habit of singing and dancing to this song every time you and your child have to part, your child may come to associate this happy singing and dancing experience with the separation, and it will start to feel more comfortable and familiar.
Bang a Drum
Get down on the floor with your child and start banging on drums, pots and pans, or any containers you have. (Or use pillows for a quieter game!) Try making a rhythm and asking your child to imitate it. Make up lots of different rhythms and ask your child to make up her own. Try playing one rhythm while your child plays a different one. This activity introduces kids to rhythm and tempo and is a simple extension of a musical activity most kids love already.
Do the "Sticky Dance"
Here's a way to add an additional tactile experience to dancing. Set up squares of contact paper, sticky-side up, around the room. (The kitchen floor works best.). Tape down the edges of the paper with masking tape. In bare feet or socks, run, skip, and march together across the paper. Talk with your child about the way the sticky paper feels and the way it sounds. Now, turn on some music and start dancing or marching in place to the music. Stay on one piece of the contact paper or dance from one piece to the next. Try dancing on the bare floor and then on the contact paper or dance with one foot on and one foot off the paper.
Sing a "What We're Doing" Song
One of the easiest ways to add music to your child's life is to turn everything you and your child do into a song. At bath time, make up a "We're Taking a Bath" song. Just start singing whatever comes to mind. The lyrics can be as simple as "Oh, we're taking a bath in the water. We're getting all soapy and wet. Taking a bath in the water. Taking a bath, you bet!" You don't have to rhyme or stick to a single melody.
Let your child make up lyrics or try singing one line of the song and having your child repeat the line. For example, when getting dressed, you and your child could sing. "It's time to get dressed. It's time to get dressed. Now, what should we wear? Now, what should we wear?" Doing this helps introduce your child to music, melody, and language, and it makes even mundane tasks more enjoyable.
