How to foster creativity through music

Our brains are designed to respond favourably to rhythms and melodies. Cultivating a sense of music can have many benefits in developing other skills.

There is a large body of scientific literature linking music to the learning of other skills, such as language. At an early age, music helps children to learn to speak and read; in fact, children learn the rhythm and musicality of words long before they learn their meaning.

At Coruña British International School we are aware of how easy it is for our brains to acquire rhythms and sounds from an early age, as we can see, it can be combined with other educational activities to make them more efficient. One of them is the development of creativity.

Creativity is defined as the ability to explore, experiment and generate diverse ideas. In childhood, fostering creativity is highly recommended due to the plasticity of children's brains at this stage. And music, as a tool, can help foster this capacity. How?

Here are some ideas for using music as a source of creativity in children.

 

Create sounds in the objects around you

Introducing rhythms and musicality into a child's daily life is simple and does not require many elements. An idea as simple as creating simple sounds with items in our environment can be an easy way to encourage a child to experiment. Since any object we have around us can produce a sound depending on how we strike it, this is an opportunity to encourage creativity by inventing musical games and dynamics around these objects.

The early childhood music group Badabum provides examples of this educational approach with materials that we can all find around us, such as bottle caps or sand.

There are endless possibilities to create many different sounds, and these will only depend on the creativity of the child to produce them.

Playing with the voice

The voice is an instrument that we all carry with us at all times, and it has enormous potential to generate very creative situations with children. Any pleasant conversation can become an opportunity to rhyme, add voices and create rhythms, melodies, repetitions. Making up songs will stimulate children's creativity and invite them to play with the possibilities that their own voice offers.

Experimenting with musical instruments

Of course, if we have them at our disposal, simple musical instruments are a great source of creativity for the little ones, such as flutes, drums, xylophones or ukuleles. For young children, percussion instruments are especially interesting, as they offer a wide variety of sounds with a few simple taps.

Introduce sound effects into other activities

Creating music with instruments, with any object around us or with our own voice can be an occupation in itself. We can also combine this activity with other activities to make them more attractive. For example, when telling a story, we can set the narrative to music by creating sounds for each action. Another idea is to accompany everyday tasks that can be tedious, such as putting away toys or clearing the table, with songs adapted to each moment.

Of course, these musical proposals require time to be developed, and a lot of freedom and flexibility to experiment. Encouraging creativity through musical activities such as these will favour the child's neuronal development, as well as providing a fun atmosphere to accompany other tasks in our daily lives.