Sing With Your Child

Early Intervention staff try to protect the health of all children involved in our program.  To help us do this, please reschedule your appointment if anyone in your home is ill.  Thank you for your help in keeping all kiddos healthy.

Tips for Singing with Your Child

Sing with your child often during the day.  Children do not care if you can carry a tune.  They just enjoy singing with you.  The main thing is that you make singing an enjoyable experience with your child. Singing activities can include: rhyming songs, silly songs, songs that repeat, made up songs, finger plays, nursery rhymes, poems, clapping for syllables, pattern books, and emphasis on words that begin the same.

Songs and rhymes provide comforting rhythms in children's early lives.  You can read, recite, chant or sing in a soft, low voice whenever a child is sleepy or fretful.  Songs are also fun to say and learn when children are wide awake and happy.

From songs, children learn words, sentences, rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, all of which they'll find later in books they read.  Kids who can't recognize the fact that two words such as bed and Fred rhyme - have a hard time learning to read, whereas those who can rhyme are able to make more inspired and more correct guesses about what a particular word might be when they are reading. - Purdue University Speech/Language Pathology Early Language Program

Rhymers will be readers: it's that simple.  Experts in literacy and child development have discovered that if children know eight nursery rhymes by heart by the time they're 4 years old, they're usually among the best readers by the time they're 8 years old. - Fox, Mem, Reading Magic Why Reading Aloud to our Children will Change their Lives Forever, Orlando: Harcourt, 2001