Marching to the beat provides one of the most essential skills that an early childhood music center must include. Having children march to the beat of a song develops the ability to sense rhythm and sets the stage for future rhythmic development. Early education centers must teach children to march, clap and walk in rhythm to songs of varying tempos. Even simple games like musical chairs will help children develop an awareness of music, develop coordination and prepare them for advanced musical studies.
As soon as children are ready, they should begin learning how to sing songs with others and individually. Songs help children to learn about high and low pitches and the provide the ability for students to learn how to create logical musical phrases. Children start with simple common melodies such as "Row Your Boat." Children should also experiment with singing their own melodies and imitating new melodies created by the instructor. Children do not need to learn to read music, they just need to learn how to imitate in early music education.
Chanting teaches children about how to properly create inflections within speech and places an emphasis on specific pitches. This teaches children how to properly lower her pitch at the end of a sentence and raise her pitch for emphasis. Chants should concentrate on a single pitch and chant words with special attention paid to the rhythm in which each syllable is chanted. For instance, the word "water" should be divided into the syllables "wa" and "ter." The second syllable will be longer than the first syllable. This not only teaches rhythm, but it provides additional training in how to pronounce words.
Pitch matching exercises must be included in any early childhood music education program. Instructors should sing pitches and have the students repeat the pitch. Educators can start with one or two pitches and gradually add several pitches to increase musical memory. As with any exercises in childhood music, you should aim for improvement rather than a specific number of pitches. Pitch matching and recall will prepare a child to sing songs based on music notation and learn to read music provided to the child at a later stage.