Recent years have seen a lot of interest in how music might contribute to children's overall development, such as the supposed influence on the brain from listening to Mozart.
But there has also been a temptation to overstate the case, arising from very slim scientific evidence. The original Mozart listening experiment was carried out with university students, and its benefits for the students' ability to do a kind of puzzle were short-lived. Yet this one small finding has spawned a whole industry of books, CDs and internet sites based on what has become known as the Mozart Effect.
Similar effects on babies and young children have never been demonstrated by research. Nevertheless, there are obvious commercial gains to be made from convincing parents that their child can get a head start if they buy 'smarter baby' CDs.
However, in some as-yet inconclusive studies, young children given keyboard lessons for a year have improved their spatio-temporal skills.
Spatio-temporal reasoning is the kind of thinking where you work out whether your car will manoeuvre into that parking space or not. No doubt it's useful for some purposes, but it's only one of the many skills and qualities children need to learn successfully.
What is now being given more thought is children's need to have a positive sense of themselves as capable learners and a positive disposition towards learning. Here, I think, music can be very valuable. It can give children a good experience of participation, of learning to work with others, of learning certain co-ordination skills from music and movement activities, and of learning to focus and listen carefully.
Irrespective of whether music makes children brainier or has other benefits, children will only gain if music is approached in developmentally appropriate ways. What I would like to see is more attention given to how best to work in music with young children, and less attention to its possible effects. Listening with concentration and being able to discriminate between different sounds is a basic, all-round skill. So let's look briefly at doing some fundamental activities.
Create a completely quiet, focused moment and ask children to listen carefully. Ask them to discriminate between only slightly different sounds - two egg shakers which sound almost the same, small bells with just a slight pitch difference - and don't underestimate their abilities to perceive differences even though they can't describe them in words yet.
Another of the building blocks of music is being able to keep in time. This means being able to co-ordinate what you are doing to what others are doing and what you hear. Many children need help with what is partly a physical co-ordination skill and partly a social skill of being aware of others.
There are some children who either seem to run continuously in top gear or in low gear (you know the ones) and find it difficult to make their own 'gear changes'. Music's ability to draw everybody into the same tempo can help children learn to regulate their own tempo. Try singing a calm, soothing song, or playing some calming music, and ask the children to lie down and relax. Alternatively, do a fast jumping activity to a song or recorded music. Those children who get over-excited may need help in keeping to the right tempo.
Another basic music skill is learning to sing. Singing is not something that some children can do and some can't. It is a skill that is learned, like all skills, in step-by-step stages.
Remember that young children have small lungs and immature vocal chords, so their singing will be quiet. Don't ask them to 'sing up' or else they will shout and risk straining their voices. Remember, too, that a song is a complicated thing - there are words and melody to learn and reproduce.
Choose the simplest songs when you are helping children to learn to sing.
And if the song has actions too, this adds to the challenges. Leave out the actions while the children learn the song itself. One more tip is to sing the song very slowly - quite deliberately - at a pitch which feels comfortable in your voice, not too high. NW Susan Young is author of Music with the Under Fours, published by RoutledgeFalmer
