Monkey Chatter

It’s never too early to start singing to your baby and singing is a wonderful activity that can enhance your child's language development.

Babies need stimulating visual experiences to encourage them to interact verbally and it’s no coincidence that young children are drawn to activities with music, rhythm and repetition… all of these elements can help young children learn.

Singing helps children make sounds, talk, move, listen, follow directions and remember new words especially when repetition and actions are part of the songs. Singing can help your child to discern the smaller sounds in words, which in turn, can boost their vocabulary.

By slowing down the sounds that words make, singing can help your child to recognise the beginning, middle, and ending sounds that make up words. This, in turn, can help your child with sounding out words when they begin to read.

Some of the first sounds that babies make are animal sounds so it’s no coincidence that so many nursery rhymes and songs have animal themes as these encourage little ones to imitate the sounds to help language development.

At Monkey Music we use interactive songs and nursery rhymes with actions and rhythmic body movements, such as rocking and bouncing and we vary the songs and rhymes we teach to create many moments to encourage language development. We use dramatic speech, keeping words and actions simple and repetitive to encourage interaction and emotional response which in turn activates the brain to release chemicals that help memory.

Your child loves the sound of your voice, so sing to your baby or toddler as often as you can; at bath time, at bedtime, in the car, wherever!