Nursery Equipment: Music - Tune in

Music can play a valuable role in supporting children's communication and language development. It is important to understand how music and language are connected so that musical activities can be carefully selected and planned to make the most of music's potential.

Songs and rhymes support language and communication particularly well - and so this will be my focus in this piece. But the full range of music activities (playing instruments, listening to music and moving rhythmically) also support the ability to discriminate between, and separate, sounds - abilities that are crucial for language learning and, at a later stage, reading.

The most important point is that all music activities need to be carefully tailored to babies' and young children's developmental abilities if they are to have cross-over benefits to language. Not just any song-singing or musical activities will do.

INFANT-DIRECTED

From the moment of birth, babies are communicating through vocal sounds, movements and eye contact. Ask anyone to communicate with a baby and they will adopt a special style of talking or singing, termed 'infant-directed'.

Infant-directed talk is like music -it is rhythmic, the pitch rises and falls melodically, and it has a special voice quality that is softer and of a higher pitch than the average speech. The starting points of both music and language lie in this infant-directed communication, so baby songs and rhymes have a special role in fostering early interaction, creating a close bond between carer and baby and laying foundations for later learning.

Playsongs: Action Songs and Rhymes for Babies and Toddlers by Sheena Roberts (AC & Black) comes with a CD and contains traditional rhymes. This is a long-standing favourite, but for good reason. There are two more books in the same series, Lively Time Playsongs and Sleepy Time Playsongs. All are beautiful to look at and listen to.

It is also worth knowing about the Singing Together songbook and CD for very young children — birth to two — from the Parents Early Education Partnership (£7). The organisation publishes resources to support language and music from birth to five.

There are also the Baby Board Books by Child's Play. With older babies, this picture-book series, based on a single song such as Heads Shoulder Knees and Toes, can be sung one-to-one.

It is a good idea to go through these books slowly, pointing at pictures and doing the actions. This creates a direct relationship between picture, pointing, singing and language learning.

ONE TO THREE YEARS

During these years, children need a rich daily diet of many songs and rhymes. This is the stage when their spoken language is developing at a rapid pace. These songs and rhymes need to have certain characteristics if they are to support language and communication development. They should have:

• few, simple words, clearly enunciated
• repeated words and phrases
• uncomplicated melodies that are sung slowly
• no actions - or only a few simple actions to underscore the meaning of the word.

Songs and rhymes should be sung and spoken to children by the adults as part of their everyday activities and routines and not just confined to group times.

Talking Tins (£5.99 for 10 seconds recording time, £7.99 for 40 seconds), from www.arc-education.co.uk, were originally designed for sight-impaired people. They are small, robust recording devices that can be threaded on to neck straps for children to wear. Songs sung by parent or practitioner can be captured or children can record their own vocalising.

THREE TO FIVES

The same principles apply for songs to sing with three to fives, except that the melodies and words are able to become increasingly demanding. Crucially, songs and rhymes support the beginnings of literacy. They help children to:

• learn the rhythm and rhyme of spoken and written language
• learn new vocabulary, particularly when repeated often
• learn to discriminate between a variety of sounds.

Learning to discriminate between sounds, not just by learning songs but also by taking part in instrument-playing activities, perhaps improvising and making up their own music, is known to support children's phonological awareness and rhythmic abilities. This in turn helps not just their spoken language but will also support their reading.

RESOURCES

The best resource is free — the singing voices of the adults who care for and educate children. Sadly, many adults have grown up lacking in confidence as singers. If that is you, then please know that good songs to sing to very young children are the simplest and shortest and the best moments to sing are one-to-one between adult and child. No one else need hear you.

Although it is clearly ideal to know a wide repertoire of child-appropriate songs, it is also great to make up little ditties on the spot to fit with what babies or children are doing.

I once visited a nursery and noticed a little boy was upset at not being able to find his new gloves. I then heard the practitioner with him singing quietly and soothingly as she helped him to search. In that nursery, making up ditties for all kinds of everyday situations was commonplace among practitioners and they had long stopped feeling self-conscious about singing.

LEARNING SONGS

Nowadays, most of us grow up without learning a rich heritage of babies' and children's songs, so you may need to make a special effort to learn songs. Many of today's commercially produced CDs are attractive for children but are not educationally or developmentally appropriate.

Children need to be able to 'get on board' with songs, musically and linguistically, in order to truly benefit. Usually, practitioners learn the familiar nursery repertoire just by listening and copying their colleagues. The result is that the same few famliar songs are in circulation. But these are not necessarily the most suitable, especially for the youngest children. I suggest making a conscious effort to learn more songs using CDs suggested here, both to increase the number of songs you know and to ensure their age appropriateness.

SONG SACKS AND SONG PICTURES

Commercial song sacks provide props linking with song words. These are attractive and useful, but they can be expensive. Alternatively, use everyday items and toys as props for songs and keep these all in one bag. Even simpler, find pictures to suggest songs and stick these on cards. Children can then choose a prop from the bag or a song card. This is a good way to encourage children to start singing the song independently without needing the adult to sing for them.

Props and cards can be set out for children's self-initiated singing play. Commercial products include the Music Basket (£45), a wicker basket with three books — including Incy Wincy Spider — and a selection of instruments from www.earlyexcellence.com. Monkey Singing Sack includes three different types of monkeys and stretchy Lycra for bouncing on the 'bed' (£31.06) from www.thetotempole.co.uk.

PUPPETS

There is some evidence that puppets can encourage children to sing and speak. Speech therapists often use puppets that can mouth to support children's language development and the same kinds of puppets can support children in learning to sing. Again, leave the puppets out to encourage singing play.

For group singing, try the Baa Baa Black Sheep Book with Finger Puppet (£5.99) from www.puppetsbypost.com. Or choose individual puppets that accompany different nursery rhymes - for example, the Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Finger Puppet, (£3.50) also from www.puppetsbypost.com. Include a selection of Farmyard Animal glove puppets (£18) from www.arc-education.co.uk.

VOICE RECORDERS AND MICROPHONES

Instant voice recording and playback enables children to experiment and explore their singing and speaking voices. Today's digitally 'switched on' children can quickly manage recording and play-back technologies themselves. In one nursery, practitioners recorded children's spontaneous singing on their mobile phones and sent MP3 files to parents.

Chatter-Box (£26.95) from www.mesdirect.com can record 24 ten-second clips of music or songs (see page 11 for similar resource ideas).

CDs

If you want stylistically interesting songs that are about the real things in children's lives - like Velcro shoes and how long to bedtime - then the Music for Aardvarks CDs (www.musicforaardvarks.com) are for you. They are mostly suitable for fourand five-year-olds.

Barefoot Books are storybooks with accompanying CDs of story-songs that match the books exactly. The CDs are attractively sung in folk style, a little fast for young children to sing along to but good for listening, learning and then later singing the song without the CD. See http://store.barefootbooks.com