EYFS Best Practice: All about ... movement and music

With so much emphasis on getting children ready for reading, writing and numeracy in the early years, it is important to remember that the ability to understand and use written language is built upon earlier physical foundations developed in the pre-school years. Movement, touch and music are like the environmental software that enable the developing nervous system of the child to unfold its potential.

MOVEMENT

In the protected environment of the womb, the developing baby is safely cocooned from many of the dangers of the outside world. The pre-birth environment has changed little since man first learned to stand and walk on two legs, which recent discoveries suggest may have been as long as four million years ago.

In this sense, every baby is born from the prehistoric world of the womb into a new world as 'ancient man', and must learn to adapt to the demands of an environment very different from the world he was designed to live in some two million years ago.(1)

In the 1800s, a biological theory was born which stated that ontogeny, the origin and development of an individual organism from embryo to adult, recapitulates phylogeny, the evolutionary history of the species.(2)

This theory has since been discounted in its literal sense. But in a functional sense, every child retraces in telescopic form the evolutionary steps of its forebears in terms of movement and language development during the early years. Children who are deprived of sufficient movement and sensory experience in the pre-school years run the risk of developing problems with specific aspects of learning and emotional regulation (behaviour) later on.(3)

Due to a unique combination of enlarged head and restricted birth canal, the human baby is born at a relatively immature stage of development compared with other mammals, unable even to get up on to its feet and support its own body weight until well into the second six months after birth.

During the first year of life, the normally developing baby runs a fast-forward 'replay' of its ancestral history. Movements that began in the womb were fish-like and appropriate for an environment surrounded by fluid. After birth, when the baby has to develop muscle tone against gravity, movements progress to crawling on the belly like a reptile, crawling on hands and knees like a mammal, and briefly passing through a phase when the baby can stand unaided for a few moments but must still use its hands and arms to support balance, like an ape.

Only when it is able to stand and walk with free use of the hands do the skills that are unique to the human race - spoken language, fine motor control, and eventually the ability to understand and use written langauge - start to develop.

LANGUAGE

Language acquisition, like the development of postural control and co-ordination, involves a re-run of the past involving two key elements: gesture and music. In 1872 Charles Darwin wrote(4), 'I have been led to infer that the progenitors of man probably uttered musical tones before they had acquired the powers of articulate speech.'

What we think of as music in the modern world has its origins in two types of sound:

- first, rhythm, expressed through the beating of drums, dance movements and the stamping of feet - body-based communication articulated through pathways involved in proprioception (feedback to the brain derived from the tendons, muscles and joints of the body) and the vestibular system (balance system). These are 'lower' centres in the brain, which are more developed in babies and young children than the "higher" centres later involved in speech.

- secondly, tone - uttered by using the vocal organs (also controlled by more primitive parts of the brain than the ones which govern speech).

In other words, rhythmical and musical centres of the brain are more 'ready for use' in the early years than the more complex, higher centres associated with speech and written language. In this respect, the training of movement and music in the early years provides essential building blocks for more complex skills later on.

Babies are born with an innate desire to communicate, which started before birth when the foetus felt its mother's emotions through chemical changes that took place in her body, alterations in the nature and speed of her movements and the melody, volume and rhythms of her speech. Speech was sensed through a combination of vibration and sound.

Babies can 'hear' from the 24th week of pregnancy, but because of the surrounding amniotic fluid and barrier of the abdominal wall, they hear only a limited range of lowerto medium-frequency sounds, which correspond roughly to the same range as the human voice and the majority of musical instruments used in classical music.

Babies and infants (where infant means 'one without speech') have a special language that is more akin to music and mime than speech.

Up to 90 per cent of communication in the adult world is based on the non-verbal aspects of language - posture, gesture, eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, speed, rhythm and cadence.

Babies are able to detect, and increasingly use, these powerful components of universal language in the first year of life. In this sense, the first expressive language of life is one of music and movement.

Babies are also born mimics. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers(5) studying mother-infant interaction observed babies who were only a few days old imitating adult gestures such as sticking out the tongue.

They concluded that humans are born with the same capacity to assimilate movements, feelings and gestures through simple imitation, and this early mimetic language becomes part of a mirror neuron system, which is able to sense and recognise the feelings of others - the origins of sympathy. (The more commonly used word 'empathy' originally meant to 'give the evil eye'; 'sympathy' means to feel as another.)

Building on these early, innate abilities is partly dependent on receiving sufficient and appropriate environmental experience in the form of social engagement - first, with the primary source of love, and in later years with siblings, adults and peers.

Flexible exchange

The technological revolution of the past 30 years and the lifestyle changes it has brought to parents is changing the quality and quantity of direct one-to-one communication children receive. The electronic media may be useful for soothing or entertaining a fretful child, but it cannot provide direct interactive communication between individuals. It provides stimulation, but does not listen or have a flexible response to what the child has to say. Nor does it take body language into account.

The importance of interaction and flexibility is illustrated by research carried out at the University of Edinburgh(6), which examined mother-infant interactions in the first weeks of life.

They discovered that when a mother was attuned to her baby, a dialogue takes place, with the mother uttering short phrases to her baby in a sing-song voice. It she waits for a few seconds, the baby sings an answering phrase in return.

When the dialogue was analysed using a sound frequency analyser, the conversation showed all the features of a musical composition - melody, structured timing, phrasing and cadence, with one partner repeating and answering the musical phrase of the other.

If the adult 'interrupted' the baby before it had time to reply, the baby gave up and the 'conversation' came to an end. It seems that the human infant really does learn to dance before it can walk and to sing long before it can talk(7).

For the implications of this research for nursery education, see boxes.

PHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS

In the early years, physical interaction is increasingly replaced by language-based communication. Traditionally, spoken language was developed through a combination of conversational feedback, songs, reading of stories, telling of tales and folklore, and most importantly, one-to-one interaction between child and primary care-giver. Formal nursery care needs to find ways of ensuring that this type of experience is a part of every child's daily life.

A series of small-scale independent studies carried out on more than 800 children in the UK between 2000 and 2004 revealed that 48 per cent of fiveand six-year-olds and 35 per cent of eightto ten-year-olds still showed traces of infant reflexes, which should not be active beyond the first year of life, together with immature balance and co-ordination(11).

There was also a correlation between immature reflexes and lower educational achievement at the end of the school year. Children who took part in a daily programme of developmental exercises in school, based on movements that an infant would normally make in the first year(s) of life, showed significant improvements in reflex status, balance, co-ordination and academic achievement, as well as anecdotal reports of improvements in attention, behaviour and self-esteem.

These studies suggest that if the physical foundations for learning are secured in the pre-school years, then the child enters the school system better equipped to cope with the demands of the classroom. Physical education in its broadest sense is the essential ingredient of the pre-school years.

Movement, music and social engagement are the early physical foundations of language. It is as important to ensure that every child has the opportunity to pass through the developmental and evolutionary stages of physical and language development, as it is to provide adequate instruction in reading, writing and maths when they enter school.

HOW MUSIC TEACHES LANGUAGE

Music, particularly song, can be used to set the scene for the next episode of language development. Song is important because it is a special type of speech:

- Song alters the duration of individual sounds in speech, lengthening the duration of vowel sounds, which are some of the hardest to detect aurally when speech is translated into written form.

- When we sing lullabies or nursery rhymes, we also educate the earliest of the senses - the vestibular sense through gentle rocking rhythms; the sense of touch through the effect of vibration produced by the voice; and the sense of hearing through tone, timbre, repetition of similar sounds and the prolongation of certain speech sounds.

- Traditional lullabies and nursery rhymes are important because they contain the specific melodies, stresses and accents peculiar to the language from which they grew (the music of the language).

- Children need plenty of opportunity to 'voice aloud' in the early years to develop an 'internal voice', which they will need when learning to read silently later on.

- Children can learn to sing complex language sounds before they understand their meaning. The process of 'sounding out' in song prepares the voice and the ear for the visual recognition of written symbols.

- 'The voice can only reproduce what the ear can hear'(10), but the human ear is continuously enriched and entrained through feedback from the voice to the ear (audio-vocal feedback loop).

- Sound is transitory, passing in a moment, and must be remembered. Music helps speech sounds to remain in the memory for longer, as well as providing an access 'key' for retrieval of auditory stimuli.

- Music develops both sides of the brain. Although the majority of the population have their main language centre on the left side of the brain, during the years of language development both sides are involved in different aspects of receptive, expressive and understanding the meaning of language.

WHY EARLY MOVEMENT EXPERIENCE MATTERS

- Movement is the primary medium through which sensory integration takes place.

- Movement experience helps a child to develop an internal body map.

- Movement helps a child to know their place in space. This forms the basis or reference point from which other spatial judgements are made.

- In the first year(s) of life, emotional regulation is felt and expressed in physical ways and is derived from touch, feeding, movement experience, social engagement and rough and tumble play.

- A climate of fear surrounding issues of child abuse and child safety has meant that children placed in nursery care tend to receive less experience of touch than in previous generations, both in the form of parental touch and the touch and opportunities for feedback derived from rough and tumble play.

Studies on animals have found that rough and tumble play is an essential ingredient of healthy development and socialisation in animal groups. Animal pups that are deprived of physical interaction show withdrawn, anti-social and aggressive behaviour.

On the one hand, having insufficient sensory experience can result in sensation-seeking or avoidance behaviour, and on the other hand, not allowing children to take reasonable risks and experience the consequences in childhood can make them more prone to indulging in high-risk behaviour, or to fear of taking risks, later on.

Rough and tumble play in the early years provides a wealth of tactile experience as well as developing physical fitness, sensory awareness, regulation of strength and self-control and involving flexible and creative behaviour.(8)

- Sensations derived from exercising the balance mechanism help to train centres in the brain which are involved in the control of eye movements that will be necessary for reading, writing, copying and physical education, later on.

Movement has the capacity to soothe or arouse and is usually experienced with joy by young children. When there is joy, children learn.(9)

FOOTNOTES

1. Lazarev, M (2008) Mamababy: Birth before birth. Borisoglebskiy per., House 9. Moscow

2. Haeckel, E (1899) Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century

3. Goddard Blythe, SA (2008) What Babies and Children Really Need. Hawthorn Press

4. Darwin, C (1872) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Online at: http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/ frameset?itemID=F1142&viewtype=text&pageseq=1

5. Melzoff, AN; Moore, MK (1977) 'Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates'. Science, 198:75-78

Melzoff, AN; Moore, MK (1983) 'Newborn infants imitate adult facial gestures'. Child Development, 54:702-9

6. Trevarthen, C (2006) Pleasure from others' movements: how body massage and music speak with one voice to infants and give meaning to life' Paper presented at the GICM Professional Conference. Coventry, October 2006

7. ABBA paraphrase from the song 'Thank you for the music'.

8. Panksepp, J (1998) Affective Neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press. New York.

9. Kiphard, EJ (2000) Intervention programmes using the German psycho-motor approach with exceptional children. Paper presented at the 12th European Conference of Neuro-Developmental Delay in Children with Specific Learning Difficulties, Chester, March 2000

10. Madaule, P (2001) The ear-voice connection workshop seminar. Chester, November 2001

11. Goddard Blythe, SA (2005) Releasing educational potential through movement. A summary of individual studies carried out using the INPP test battery and developmental exercise programme for use in schools with children with special needs. Child Care in Practice 11/4:415-432.