At Forty Carrots, Parenting Educators often say that music lights up both sides of the brain. Science backs this and emphasizes the importance of signing and enjoying music with infants and children. Music stimulates the neural networks and actually makes connections in the brain, preparing a child’s ear, voice, and brain for language.  

Here are a few tips for engaging your child with music:

• Sway or rock with your baby to the music. This helps her feel the rhythm of the beat. 
• Move to the music!  Children love to experience music through movement. This encourages balance, body awareness, coordination, and rhythm.
• Listen to all kinds of music. They all have something different to offer!  Hearing different rhythms, beats, tones, and inflections give the brain an even better workout.
• Just as a variety in music is great, children also benefit from familiar songs and rhymes.  When your child can anticipate the beat and words, she is not only strengthening neural pathways, but she is also gaining confidence.  
• Sing the songs faster or slower, high and low, soft, and loud!   It makes it more fun for both you and your baby. 

Music is an incredibly fun and beneficial thing for you and your child.  Dance parties and sing-alongs are not only building essential cognitive and motor skills, but they are also building lasting memories.