Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Collections

To tap into music's potential for cross-curricular learning, settings need a core collection of instruments that cater for all ages, says Nicole Weinstein.

Children have an innate joy for music and, when organised as a fun and integral part of a child's life, it can offer excitement, an outlet for expressing emotions and huge potential for cross-curricular learning. Learning songs, for example, enhances vocabulary and the sound recognition skills needed in later life to assist with reading, spelling and writing, while listening to music will introduce children to the sequences used in problem solving, reasoning and numeracy.

Marjorie Ouvry, early years consultant and author of Sounds Like Playing, says, 'There should be chanting at the sandpit and singing in the home corner. Like movement, it's the common denominator that can bind together all children's learning.'

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