How Songs Can Help Your Child Learn and Retain Information

Simple songs are used to teach children important life skills in fun ways. These songs have the power to affect your child’s life forever: You likely remember songs from your childhood that taught you life lessons and new words that you can probably still recall to this day. Likewise, the use of songs in everyday activities can improve your child’s ability to learn and retain new information.

Here’s how songs and music can help with child development:

Songs help children develop better language and listening skills

Actively listening and participating in songs helps to develop children’s language skills. Songs provide different pitches, vocal emphases, and rhythmic beats that are present in everyday speaking tones.

When a child picks up on different pitches in songs, they are able to transpose this knowledge to real-life situations. Different pitches of voice are used depending on the surrounding context. If an individual is trying to be quiet, or they’re upset, then your child will be able to easily understand the context surrounding the quiet or upset pitches.

The rhythmic structure of language is present in music and speech. When your child sings songs they will pick up on natural and unnatural rhythms. Pauses and stressed syllables or words are used in conversations to build tension, signify emotion, and create vocal emphasis to highlight key points in conversations.

Emphasizing key words and phrases will help your child develop better conversational listening skills. When your child is in the classroom or talking with friends, they will understand the context behind emphasized points or emotions and remember them easier.

Songs helps children with memory

Songs and rhymes can be used to remember many kinds of information. Music permeates all areas of the brain, allowing it to be stored in multiple memory locations. The ability to retain information is increased when the child deposits memories into multiple areas.

Children learn language quicker through songs rather than lectures. Singing facilitates short-term phrase learning for unfamiliar terms. If your child is young, singing can be an excellent way to teach them unfamiliar words and phrases. These short-term memory exercises are repeated to convert the learned language into long-term memory.

Music helps children with reading

Research has found a significant link between beat-keeping and the ability to read. When your child maintains a beat, they use the same parts of the brain that are responsible for hearing sounds of speech and associating them with letters.

There are timing differences in spoken language that can greatly impact the ability to read in young children. Consonants such as “b” and “p” can be difficult for a child to distinguish the difference on paper, but their learned ability to associate timing changes in songs can help them decipher the difference between the consonants while reading.

Reading and understanding emotion in text can be difficult for your child to understand. When your child hears rhythms through songs, they will be able to better comprehend rhythms in text. Poetry, alliterations, and stress patterns are all examples of rhythm used in text. When a child cannot fully grasp verbal rhythm, they may accent wrong syllables in words or incorrectly segment the words into syllables.

Calvary Lutheran School has your child’s cognitive development and happiness in mind. We focus on nurturing children academically, spiritually, physically, emotionally and socially. Contact us at 816-595-4020 or schedule a tour to learn more about our academic program.