Explore Instruments Sounds to Develop Auditory Discrimination

Musical Parenting Tip: Explore instruments and sounds with your child.

Why?

• Awareness of specific sounds (‘timbre’) is the musical equivalent of phonemic awareness (the sounds of language), and it is developed through experience and exposure to many different musical sounds.
• Exposure to a variety of sounds & rhythms is critical to intellectual development – leading to language proficiency, spatial reasoning, and temporal reasoning.  It also increases understanding of moods and emotions.  
• The ability to isolate and focus on individual sounds will become invaluable when your child needs to listen for your voice on a noisy playground, or focus on a teacher’s voice in a busy classroom.
• Singing the ‘instruments away’ song, after exploring, is a great motivator for your child to help with clean-up – and can make great parenting easier!

How?

• Start with listening to all of these different bells!
• Read our e-book, Where is Bear? With your child.  Can you add instruments & other sounds as clues to where bear is, with each page turn?

Want to learn more?

• On our blog – read ‘Can you hear me now?’
• Also, read about the connection between focused listening (auditory discrimination) and early literacy.