How Young is Too Young...

Like most people today, I have a slew of online reading I do every day. I check Facebook, I read my LiveJournal friends, and then there's email, checking the Kindermusik Teacher's sites, twitter... It seems like the list grows longer every day. However,

Some people are quite surprised to find out that Kindermusik is for children as young as newborns. Really, what can such a young child gain from starting in a music and movement program like Kindermusik as an infant or toddler?

The following statement, jointly issued by The National Association for Music Education (MENC), the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), and the US Department of Education, helps explain just how important music education can be for even the youngest musicians...

The Value of Music for the Very Young.
The idea that very early education provides great long-term benefits has been rendered incontestable by studies in cognition and early learning. Research in developmental psychology and commonsense observation underscore both the importance and the wisdom of making music an integral and overt part of the earliest education of young children:

• [M]usic is among the first and most important modes of communication experienced by infants.
  
• As young children grow and develop, music continues as a basic medium not only of communication, but of self-expression as well.
  
• As preschool children not only listen to and respond to music, but also learn to make music by singing and playing instruments together, they create important contexts for the early learning of vital life skills such as cooperation, collaboration, and group effort.
  
• Guided music experiences also begin to teach young children to make judgments about what constitutes “good” music, thereby developing in them the rudiments of an aesthetic sense.
  
• Music contributes strongly to “school readiness...”

- excerpted from a report issued by the Early Childhood Music Summit, June 2000. Read the article in its entirety HERE.

I have one new mom with a 4-month-old in class, and when she came to a demo, she decided to sign up for one month to see how the baby reacted in class. She isn't active like the walkers, or developing fine and gross motor skills like the crawlers, but she just loves to see the other babies and observe. She also likes to listen to the music and what's going on around her. This example and others I've seen through the years have shown me that it's never too early for music class.