SING EVERY SINGLE DAY..... SING ANYTIME....... Singing helps your child's development in many ways by - building your child's confidence and self esteem
- assisting their language development (learning the song words)
- aiding their memory skills (remembering words to songs)
- encouraging creative play by dancing around and acting out songs with actions to the words (this also helps your child's physical development with all their dancing)
- promoting positive social skills with small and large groups of other children and adults
You can have planned singing, when you sit down with your children and sing a whole bunch of songs and nursery rhymes during the day, at sleep and nap times or before bed.
You can be spontaneous and sing all day everyday at any time and not be planned.
My choice is BOTH- we sing through the day, during different activities, anytime we see something that reminds us of a song, at sleep time, in the bath, on our walks, while cooking meals and even at the supermarket. It doesn't matter where we are or what we are doing, we will bust out a tune at anytime. Often it is our toddler who will start us off. We all join in and we always have a blast!
We saw a frog hopping around on our balcony yesterday so off we started singing "galumph went the little green frog", we ended up dancing around and singing it three times. We really enjoyed ourselves and then spent the next half hour talking about frogs and where they live and how they move and what sound they make.
Before I had kids, I would never be seen singing and bouncing around like I do with my kids- flopping around like a scarecrow or with my tongue hanging out like a lizard or roaring like a lion. But once my "mummy" role came along, I needed to just sing and dance my heart out because that's what my kids do and they have the time of their life. This lets me have fun and really be free and I end up having the best time too. I don't care if people hear or see me because to my kids, I am the cool funny singing and dancing mummy and my kids love that.
