Musical Development Matters
Before you spend hours trawling the Internet choosing just the right musical experience for your baby/ toddler/school-aged child, STOP….. have a look at this fantastic resource called Musical Development Matters.
Last week, after some complicated juggling, I managed to clear a day to attend a brilliant and inspiring course called Musical Development Matters The course and its accompanying document is really a labour of love by Nicola Burke, one of UK’s leading lights in early childhood musical development (0-5 years old).
“The overall purpose of Musical Development Matters is to support practitioners, teachers, musicians and parents to see the musical attributes of young children and to offer ideas as to how they can support and nurture children’s musical development by offering broad musical experiences.”
Over the course of a day, Nicola guided us through discussions on:
- awareness about how babies and young children learn
- good practice when working musically with very young children
- examples of how we as parents, teachers and educators can help and support their musical journeys
The course was such a timely reminder that children are capable of so much creativity and musicality from a very,very young age. We adults would do well to respect that and support that ability on our well-meaning quest quest to give them a musical education.
Life is always so busy . Work, school run, laundry, swimming classes, drama class, dance class, feed the kids a good meal, homework, more laundry …….but I’d like to think that we can always find the time to learn how to do meaningful things which help our children thrive.