Singing with your baby

Children are born ready, able and eager to learn and interact with other people, and in the world around them. Singing with your young child or baby is a great way of connecting with them and aiding their cognitive, language, and emotional development. Babies and young children love nursery rhymes, and the rhythm of songs and rhymes helps with the development of their language. Songs with actions in them are especially good because babies can join in with them by moving their body or doing the actions with their hands, long before they can sing along. Your child will be able to start with simple actions like clapping, or opening and closing their hands, and gradually learn to do more complicated actions as they grow and develop. 

Our videos are a useful tool in helping you and your baby or child sing songs and learn new songs. They are also subtitled in other languages including Polish, Bengali, Punjabi, Arabic and Turkish.

Singing with your baby or young child is good, because ...

Singing songs with a baby or young child is a great way to encourage their early communication. It helps the bond between adult and child, supports brain development and also language development as it increases access to key words and sounds. The benefits of singing together includes:

• Repetition, when you sing the same song to baby, they learn the actions and learn to expect what is coming next with anticipation.
• Prediction, as they learn to sing or do the actions, they often know what is the next move or line.
• Numeracy and literacy - as the babies grow into young children they may be more likely to understand number and word sequences, pattern recognition, counting, phonics and memory skills which will help them when they start school.

But what if I can't sing?

The beauty of singing with your baby is that it doesn't matter if you have singing ability or not as your baby doesn't mind! They will just love the fact you are singing rhymes and songs with actions . They will get very excited when they know it is singing time as it will be that special quality one to one time that will create a stronger bond between you both. 

And remember...

• Singing with your child is not age restrictive, it doesn't matter how old or young they are, you can sing with your child at any age.
• Help your baby move with actions songs, such as 'happy if you know it, clap your hands'. Even if your baby is too young to do actions themselves, you can help them my taking their hands in yours and clapping for example.
• If you don't know any songs to sing with your baby, don't worry you can make them up! It can be about anything whether it is their favorite toy, nap time or even when the postman posts your letters. It doesn't matter as long as you are having fun with your baby. 

This project has been funded by the Froebel Trust. The Trust promotes the continuing value in the 21st century of Froebelian principles for the education and learning of children. For more information about their work and ideas for play, please click here.