Do you sing with your children?
I hope you do!
I hope music is part of your day, every day. It's such an important part of raising children!
Here are a few reasons to overcome your shyness, lack of operatic training, inability to read music, and general stuck-in-first-gear-with-math-itis:
1. Music is joyful.
2. Music transmits culture through the generations.
3. Singing makes children happy and disposes them to learn other things.
4. Singing helps verbal children exercise other parts of their brains.
5. Singing helps nonverbal children become more verbal and patterns their speech — note how the song I posted above contains repetition that isn't tedious.
6. Singing at the top of your voice in the car gets you through some rough patches with the car-averse baby (whose name starts with a B and ends with an -idget).
7. Singing cements memories, and teaching our children lots of songs from silly to sublime will pay off one day at the campfire, Christmas carol sing-along, or Gilbert and Sullivan fest. Your children will thank you.
8. The antidote to bad music (and there is bad music, not just bad lyrics) is good music!
9. Music builds bridges.
10. Music is the universal language.
Start with nursery songs, lullabies of course, and anything you feel like singing to your baby! Musical numbers, patriotic songs, bluegrass, hymns, chant, counting songs…. What's your ethnic background? Sing those songs! Play an instrument? Play it!
Look the song up on you tube if you feel uncertain about it. Just sing it!
One reason I love the Ambleside website is that they include a folksong cycle and a hymn cycle.
{I don't know how I homeschooled before the internet.}
What's wonderful about little children is that they have nothing and no one to compare you to! You're all they know! And they love you!
As far as they're concerned, you could be Joan Sutherland and Joan Baez wrapped into a cozy package.
If your children are older and you feel a little abashed about showing this side of yourself, enlist their help in getting the ball rolling. One song leads to another…
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