Elementary Music Education

Best Parents’ and Music Teachers’ Resources in Music Lessons for Children

How Education in Music Improves Learning Skills

We talked about the advantages of vocal training. Now, let’s see how learning to play instruments of music improves learning skills of the child in other spheres of life. We shall begin with writing skills.

As in all things, if you practice long enough, you can learn to write well. Most adults write with ease, and children learn this skill at school and at home. In order to correctly express our thoughts on paper, we all had to learn the rules of basic grammar. Some of us have succeeded more than others: some still misspell words and make stylistic mistakes.

If the ability to write without mistakes depended only on knowing the rules, then almost everyone would be able to write correctly. But even at a normal intellectual development rate, children often have difficulties in mastering writing skills and expressing their ideas. And this happens for reasons not connected with defects of sight, hearing or any neurological impediments. The mastering of literacy can be impeded by the disruption of space perception, and here is how music improves learning abilities as you will see later.

Statistically, 60 percent of elementary school students have very vague ideas about such concepts as right, left, below, above, etc. It is easy to determine how well your child can orientate himself in space.

Face the child and ask him to move his left and right hand (or leg) up and down. Ask questions inconsistently and without any help or hints by your glances or body movement. The child should react to and answer only your verbal commands.

What are the results of this simple test? Did the child follow your directions? If he gave the correct answers to all of them, great! This means his sense of space perception is good. If the child did not complete the task or had to think about it, it means that he mirrors his letters and numbers, or rearranges letters and syllables in a word, or words, in the sentence. In addition, he might not have the spatial sense of the page border. Sometimes such children will omit letters and even syllables, or they will write two words together in a sentence. One more sign of the disruption of space perception can be the child’s habit of writing the sentence in lowercase.

Now I’m sure you’re thinking: “What does music have to do with this and how music improves learning these things?” When a child is learning the basics of playing a musical instrument, he does not have these difficulties: he definitely knows where his right and left hands are. His knowledge is supported with the use of visual methods: he has musical notation, where the left and right hand parts are clearly marked, right in front of him. And, for example, in the notation for piano, the top line specifies the right-hand part, and the bottom line specifies the left-hand part. This means that the “musical” child easily copes with such concepts as “above” and “below.” Children who study music acquire the knowledge of intervals and sound sequence in chords that will add to his spatial concepts and, hence, music improves learning and writing skills.

We can offer another test to make sure that music improves learning abilities of your child in this area. I recommend it to parents who have a good sense of rhythm, rate and good rhythmic memory.

Clap or tap a simple rhythmic pattern, and ask your son or daughter to count the number of claps or taps you made. If the child makes correct calculations but fails to repeat the given rhythmic pattern, he will write the wrong letter instead of the heard sound. He will also have difficulties with hyphenation rules and will miss the letters. A word is made of letters (sounds) and syllables, and syllables divide the word into rhythmic units.

The solution to this difficulty, if encountered in your child, is simple: encourage him to learn to play a musical instrument! Music improves learning skills!

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