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Parents who do not read and sing nursery rhymes to their
young children are to be helped to do so, says the children's
minister Beverley Hughes.
Many parents understand how this early work gives children
"a flying start" as they were brought up like this, she told
a parenting conference in London. But the importance of these
techniques would remain a mystery to others unless they were
taught, she said. Parents will be able to get advice from
a new parenting centre from next year.
Speaking to the annual conference of the National Family
and Parenting Institute, Mrs Hughes said research suggested
class was still a more important factor than intellect in
how children achieve. Differences show up as early as 22 months,
she said. "It is now clear that what parents actually do has
a huge impact on children's well-being and capacity to succeed,
both at the time and in future.
"Some parents already know that reading and singing nursery
rhymes with their young children will get them off to a flying
start - often because this is how they themselves were brought
up. For other parents without this inheritance these simple
techniques are a mystery and are likely to remain so - unless
we act and draw them to their attention."
Nursery rhyme classes?
She also claimed that many parents had lost confidence in
their skills as child-rearers. Many wanted help in establishing
the right boundaries, she said, and they would be able to
get this from next autumn through the new National Academy
for Parenting Practitioners. The new academy would also provide
support for professionals working in child care and early
years education.
Mrs Hughes said: "Research and practical experience also
show that the right parenting programmes can improve children's
outcomes, and not just in the early years - but again, only
if they are delivered well by confident and skilful practitioners."
The Department for Education and Skills stressed there would
be no element of compulsion in the help and advice offered
to parents and dismissed newspaper claims that some would
be forced to attend nursery rhyme classes. But the minister
said she wanted to "broaden and deepen" the debate about the
changing needs and aspirations of families.
(BBC News, 14.11.06)
When it comes to favourite lullabies, babies prefer Mummy
to Mozart every time. They appreciate their mothers' attempts
at holding a tune much more than the finest recording, a study
has found. So introducing a child to music at an early age
could simply mean turning off the CD player or radio and starting
to sing.
Researcher Dr Shannon de l'Etoile said such sing-songs encourage
bonding between mother and baby. Dr de l'Etoile, a music therapist
from the University of Miami, believes babies respond to the
familiarity of their mothers' voices. Mothers also have the
ability to choose songs and alter their delivery to match
their babies' moods.
Previous studies have shown music calms babies and can speed
their recovery from illness. Listening to classical music
is even thought to boost brainpower. Dr de l'Etoile said:
"Mothers can use singing to convey emotional information.
Singing allows mothers and infants to synchronise their emotional
states. Singing may help mothers and infants establish a secure
relationship needed for optimal infant development."
The study examined how 60 babies, between six and nine months
old, reacted to various types of singing. The infants sat
in their pushchairs while their mothers sang a selection of
songs they chose themselves. The women were also asked to
sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. One of the researchers
also sang the nursery rhyme to the children. Finally, the
babies listened to some lively recorded music.
Their reactions - such as laughter, crying, clapping and
bouncing - showed they much preferred their mothers' voices
to the recorded music. Mothers' attempts at their favourite
songs and at Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star scored three times
as highly as the recording. However, the babies' overall favourite
was the researcher's particularly tuneful version of Twinkle,
Twinkle Little Star.
Writing in the journal Infant Behavior & Development, the
researchers said this was an unexpected result. They explained
it by pointing out that their researchers were musically trained,
which made them more of a hit than the mothers who felt nervous
about singing in public.
Previous studies have confirmed the benefits of Mozart. Students
who listened to his music for ten minutes before an exam did
better than those who listened to other composers or none
at all, a German study found. The frequency and rhythmic qualities
of Mozart's music is thought to stimulate the brain.
(Fiona MacRae, Daily Mail, 21.06.06)
A baby cannot talk, sing or dance at six months. But it has
got rhythm. Researchers report today that at six months, babies
can detect subtle variations in complex rhythmic patterns
of Balkan folk dance tunes. Adult migrants from Macedonia
or the Bulgarian mountains can tell the difference. Western
adults cannot.
Erin Hannon, of Cornell University, and a colleague at the
University of Toronto report in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science that a seemingly innate musical awareness
in infants seemed to falter as the months went by, and the
babies hear more Britney Spears, Charlotte Church and the
Crazy Frog. "By the time the babies are 12-months-old, they
much more closely resemble adults who are more sensitive to
the rhythms in their own culture's music than to rhythms in
a foreign musical culture," she said.
They found infants make sense of language, tell faces, and
can distinguish Vivaldi played forward or backwards. The study
confirms a growing suspicion that babies begin life with an
open mind, but start to develop personal tastes in the first
year of life.
The scientists counted the seconds a baby would stare at
a cartoon. The same cartoon was paired with two different
song versions. One kept the basic rhythm; the other disrupted
it. "If the infants showed a greater interest in one.it's
because they detected a difference," Dr Hannon said. "Young
infants, who have much less experience listening to music,
lack these perceptual biases and respond to rhythmic structures
both familiar and foreign."
(Tim Radford, Science Editor, The Guardian,
16.08.05)
It's not easy being born, so doctors in a Slovak hospital
are offering their new arrivals an unusual stress reliever:
headphones. One- and two-day-old babies listen to classical
music as part of an experimental programme.
Doctors at Kosice-Saca Hospital, the first private hospital
in Slovakia, believe the music therapy helps newborns reduce
stress and stay healthy. Shortly after birth, infants receive
five 20-minute music sessions each day. Doctors found that
while the tikes are tuned in, most of them fall asleep or
lie quietly.
The hospital's observations could be linked to the still
controversial 'Mozart effect', which was first reported in
Nature in 1993. In the study, scientists at the University
of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, showed that listening to a Mozart piano
sonata for ten minutes prior to taking an intelligence test
improved students' scores.
(National Geographic, 12.08.05)
Remarkable gains in early reading are being reported by a
Glasgow east end nursery following specialist music tuition.
The four-year-olds from Queen Mary Street in Bridgeton received
lessons from a Kodaly music specialist, a rhythm-based approach
developed by the Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly.
The research compared 32 children from Queen Mary Street
nursery with a control group from a similar nursery. It found
that those who had received the Kodaly tuition were 11.5 months
ahead of their chronological age in literacy by the end of
primary 1. Those who had not received any music education
had a mean reading age of 4.6 months less than their chronological
age.
Maureen Myant, senior educational psychologist in Glasgow,
who conducted the study, believes that early exposure to this
particular form of music tuition gave the children a better
phonological awareness, which in turn gave them a better letter
knowledge and reading ability.
Kodaly developed a teaching method for young children which,
at its basic level, involves opportunities to say the words
to songs in rhyme, clap the basic beat, step to the beat and
clap the rhythm of the text. The concepts of high-low, loud-soft,
fast-slow are also taught. The sessions lasted 20-30 minutes
a week, with nursery staff doing daily singing sessions for
10-15 minutes.
(TES, 01.07.05)
Parents who bounce their babies to a song and rock them to
a lullaby are unwittingly helping their brains to appreciate
music, scientists have discovered. The ability to feel the
strong and weak beats in a rhythm allows people to move and
dance in time to music. Now the corresponding way that movement
shapes our appreciation of the complex structures of music
has been revealed by a team at McMaster University in Hamilton,
Ontario.
"The simultaneous experience of listening and moving to a
rhythm wires the brain so that different senses work together,"
said Prof Laurel Trainor, co-author of a paper published today
in Science magazine. She has shown that the way seven-month-old
infants interpret a rhythm is influenced by the way they are
bounced to that beat.
"It has long been known that infants are attracted to music
and responsive to its emotional content. Our findings provide
evidence that the experience of body movement plays an important
role in musical rhythm perception," she said. However, she
stressed that parents should not blame themselves if their
children are not musical. "The individual differences between
people in musical ability probably stem from a combination
of genetic and experiential effects," she said.
(Roger Highfield, Science Editor, Daily Telegraph, 03.06.05)
Early years settings in England can now apply for grants
of up to £15,000 to set up music-making activities. The funding
scheme, First Steps, has been launched by the charity Youth
Music to give the under-fives access to high-quality music
provision. Nurseries, EYDCPs, Sure Start programmes and other
organisations can apply from 1 July for grants between £5,000
and £15,000 to pay for the services of a skilled early years
music specialist. To be eligible they must provide weekly
creative music-making activities lasting from six to 12 months.
Applications can be downloaded at www.youthmusic.org.uk
(Nursery World, 23.06.05)
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