044: How to introduce your child to music (even if you can’t play or sing)

I can’t play any instruments (unless the recorder counts?).  I certainly can’t sing.  But my daughter really enjoys music, and there are a whole host of studies showing how playing music benefits children’s brain development.  So what’s a non-music playing, non-singing parent to do? Dr. Wendell Hanna’s new book, the Children’s Music Studio: A Reggio-Inspired Approach (Affiliate link), give us SO MANY ways to interact with music with our children.  I tried one of her ‘provocations’ with my daughter’s daycare class and I was blown away.  Give this episode a listen, and be inspired.     Other episodes referenced in this episode 027: Is a Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool right for my child? To hear my interview with math tutor Wes Carroll, go to www.yourhomeschoolingmojo.com, click any of the “sign up” buttons on that page, scroll down to see the curriculum of the course, and look for the interview with Wes which is available as a free preview.   References Allsup, R.E., & Benedict, C. (2008). The problems of band: An inquiry into the future of instrumental music education. Philosophy of Music Education Review 16(2), 156-173. Anvari, S.H., Trainor, L.J., Woodside, J., & Levy, B.A. (2002). Relations among musical skills, phonological processing, and early reading ability in preschool children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 83, 111-130. Bilhartz, T.D., Bruhn, R.A., & Olson, J.E. (2000). The effect of early music training on child cognitive development. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 20(4), 616-636. Catterall, J.S., & Rauscher, F.H. (2008). Unpacking the impact of music on intelligence. In W. Gruhn & F. Rauscher, Neurosciences in Music Pedagogy (pp.171-201). Happague, NY: Nova Science Publishers. Hallam, S. (2010). The power of music: Its impact on the intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people. International Journal of Music Education 28(3), 269-289. Hanna, W. (2016). The children’s music studio: A Reggio-inspired approach. New York, NY: Oxford. (Affiliate link) Heuser, F. (2011). Ensemble-based instrumental music instruction: Dead-end tradition or opportunity for socially enlightened teaching. Music Education Research 12(3), 293-305. Kirschner, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children. Evolution and Human Behavior 31, 354-364. Morehouse, P.G. (2013). Toddlers through grade 2: The importance of music making in child development. YC Young Children 68(4), 82-89. Rauscher, F.H. (1993). Music and spatial task performance. Nature 365(6447), 611. Rauscher, F.H., Shaw, G.L., & Ky, K.N. (1995). Listening to Mozart enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: towards a neuropsychological basis. Neuroscience Letters 185, 44-47. Rauscher, F.H., & Zupan, M.A. (2000). Classroom keyboard instruction improves kindergarten children’s spatial-temporal performance: A field experiment. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 15(2), 215-228. Rauscher, F.H. (2003). Can music instruction affect children’s cognitive development? ERIC Digest EDO-PS-03-12. Rauscher, F.H., & Hinton, S.C. (2006). The Mozart effect: Music listening is not music instruction. Educational Psychologist 41(4) 233-238. Schlaug, G., Norton, A., Overy, K., & Winner, E. (2005). Effects of music training on the child’s brain and cognitive development. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1060, 219-230. Scott, S. (2011). Contemplating a constructivist stance for active learning within music education. Arts Education Policy Review 112(4), 191-198. SEGMeasurement (n.d.). Effectiveness of ABC Music & Me on the development of language and literacy skills. Retrieved from: https://media2.kindermusik.com/website/2015/02/ABCMusicMe_ResearchStudy_FullReport.pdf Smithrim, K., & Upitis, R. (2005). Learning through the arts: Lessons of Engagement. Canadian Journal of Education / Revue Canadienne de l’education 28(1/2), 109-127. Standley, J.M., Walforth, D., & Nguyen, J. (2009). Effect of parent/child group music activities on toddler development: A pilot study. Music Therapy Perspectives 27(1), 11-15.   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen: [00:38] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today I’d like to welcome my guest, Wendell Hanna, who is Professor of Music Education at San Francisco State University. Professor Hanna’s academic background includes a BA from the University of South Florida and a Master’s in music from Yale University in orchestral bassoon performance. After several years of teaching and performing in San Francisco Bay Area orchestras as a freelance musician, Professor Hanna then obtained her public school and teaching credential and taught elementary music in the Oregon public schools. Before obtaining a Ph.D At the University of Oregon. It was there that she shifted our attention to younger children and began researching and working musically with infants, toddlers, and preschool aged children. In 2002, she was offered a professorship at San Francisco State University where she researches and also teaches, early childhood musical development and local preschools. It was through teaching in a local corporate preschool that she encountered emergent learning and the Reggio approach. Now I discovered professor Hanna’s work not long after I heard a piece on NPR about the links between listening to music and learning grammar, so I was already looking for someone to talk with about the connections between music and child development, but today, dear listeners, we’re going to get so much more than that. Jen: [01:49] Professor Hanna has just published a new book called The Children’s Music Studio, a Reggio inspired approach and as soon as I read it, I knew that I had to ask her to do an interview with us because their interests coincides so neatly with my own. She brings a really rigorous evidence based view on the impact of music on a child’s development and she has also studied early childhood education in Reggio Emilia, Italy as I have done as well, and wants to bring that evidence-based view of music to Reggio inspired classrooms. Welcome Dr. Hanna. New Speaker:  [02:17] Thank you, Jen. Thank you for inviting me. New Speaker: [02:20] So I wonder if we can start kind of probably where parents already have had some exposure to information about music and related to child development. Can you tell us what is the Mozart Effect and how does what parents might have heard about it differ from what the study actually found? Dr. Hanna: [02:38] Sure, so the Mozart Effect was a research study and there have been many more research studies since the original one which was in 1993 in southern California, Rauscher and Associates and they, they looked at the effect of listening to a Mozart music and how that affected learning and their results were published in Nature magazine and they said that especially on spatial reasoning and a little bit on memory that listening to Mozart had positive effects on your ability to concentrate and learn. Fortunately, people got very excited about things, especially in my field of music education, we were like, Hallelujah. This is what we’ve been looking for. Scientific evidence of what we’ve always known to be true, and here it is. However, researchers, we were like, wow, let me look into this research, and then we discovered, wow, they listened to some Mozart for 15 minutes and then they became smarter. Hm, let’s replicate this just to make sure. And so it was replicated many, many, many times and the same results were not found and that’s a problem with research; it needs to be replicated in their same results, need to be found each time or most of the times it is replicated. Dr. Hanna: [04:02] So that was a problem. Many people have really jumped on. The idea of Mozart makes you smarter because it feels true. It just feels so right. New Speaker: