Casio – Stimulus to my kid’s Development
I am a Bengali and Bengali parents love training their kids in the creative field. Music lessons, dance lessons, art lessons were all part of my childhood journey. While I enjoyed singing and learning to play the harmonium, I never liked the part about sitting down quietly while playing the same. I could have never imagined that I could achieve any certification in the music field but my mother who was also my teacher encouraged me at every step.
Time has flown so quickly and now I am donning the hat of a wife and a mother. It is a dual responsibility and I try my level best to fulfill the same with utmost care and love. Being a parent, you need to always observe the likes and dislikes of your child so that you can help them when they are growing up. When my daughter was around two and a half years old, I heard her humming a nursery rhyme.
It was a great moment for me and I immediately asked my husband if we could enroll her for music classes. He knows that I have taken preliminary musical training and hence encouraged me to take up the responsibility of teaching music to our daughter. Since I had lost touch with music, especially the keyboard which was an integral part of my childhood, I started re-learning the same. I would have lost touch with the Casio Mini Keyboard if not for my daughter.
This was the best thing that happened since along with singing rhymes, my daughter also learned to play the keyboard from a very young age. Now, she is six years old and I teach her music in an incremental fashion so that she enjoys as well as learns music.
Phonological awareness – A basic part of language skill?
While I did know the ability of music to improve the understanding of phonetics, it was when my daughter started reading early; I realized the role it has played in her language and vocabulary development. Research says that teaching music helps children learn faster. Maximum age of
brain plasticity is first 1000 days of life (around three years). But the sensitivity of the brain to
learn from listening to music may stay up to the age of 11 years.
Musical Keyboard – More than just a Keyboard
Keyboard training not only became a source of joy and creativity, but it also made my daughter more confident and helped in maintaining brain plasticity.
Many areas of our brain need to work together to understand and reproduce
music and this is what I saw when I started playing music with my daughter. Learning to play the keyboard helped in improving her cognitive skills. Music also helped in the development of her primary language skills as well as second language reading and writing skills.
Some of the benefits of learning music at an early age were not known to us but the results started showing up with each passing day. Early music training developed her speech processing
skills, which in turn resulted in better phonological perception and improved reading skills.
How did my daughter learn to play the Casio Mini keyboard?
- The Piano Apps on her tablet
- Instructional DVDs
- YouTube videos.
Takeaway:
We could see the necessary results since we made music learning fun. In a nutshell, music is not only a source of joy but something that helps in the improvement of your child’s cognitive reserve. To achieve these amazing results, you need to actively participate daily for a few minutes and then your daughter would keep on practicing on her own.
Looking back, I realize that the important decision of buying a musical instrument, specifically the Casio Mini Keyboard changed our lives as well as my daughter’s life forever. I am sure that when she grows up, she would fondly remember the days that she spent on the keyboard and I would remember the keyboard as a stimulus to my daughter’s overall development.
