Baby & Toddler Music Classes in Gramercy: How Your Toddler Is Listening Even When Wandering | Sing with Rachel

You've been bringing your baby to music class. They smile and giggle. They clap their hands. They look up at you adoringly. It's clear they love music.

Then they start crawling. Suddenly they're sliding across the mat to get a closer look at another baby. They're grabbing everything in reach. A few months later they're walking, wandering around the room and pointing at seemingly everything in it — anything but actually participating in the music.

So what happened? Maybe the teacher isn't great with toddlers? Maybe your child just isn't that into music?

I teach Musikgarten baby and toddler music classes in Gramercy in New York City, and I hear some version of this worry all the time. The good news: what you're seeing is completely normal, and your toddler is getting more out of class than it looks. Here's what's really going on, what a good toddler music class looks like, and the simple things you can do in class that make a huge difference.

"Either they can sit still, or they can listen"

My teacher and mentor once told me, "Either they can sit still or they can listen." When toddlers begin moving, moving is what they need to do. They are learning to control their bodies, and that takes a lot of their attention. Asking a new walker to sit still and listen is asking them to do two hard things at once.

What's really cool about toddlers is that they often look like they aren't listening when they are, in fact, absorbing everything. Researchers have tested this directly. In a well-known set of studies, 2-year-olds learned new words just as well when they overheard an adult teaching someone else as when the adult taught them directly (Akhtar, Jipson & Callanan, 2001). Even more striking, toddlers still picked up new words from a nearby conversation while they were busy playing with an attractive toy, and other studies found children as young as 18 months could do it too (Martínez-Sussmann et al., 2010).

In other words, the child exploring the corner of the room still has one ear firmly on the music.

I see this every week. When a child has been coming to my Musikgarten class regularly, caregivers often walk in surprised: "My child was tapping and singing the tonal patterns at home!" or "They were singing the lullaby! I thought they weren't listening." They were. They just weren't showing you yet.

What a good toddler music class looks like

There are lots of wonderful music classes out there, and they don't all look the same. One thing worth noticing, though, is where the energy in the room comes from. In some classes the leader does a lot of flashy, high-energy performing: big voices, puppets, nonstop novelty. It's fun to watch. But that's the catch — children learn to watch. They become an audience, not musicians.

A class built for toddlers looks a little different:

• The children and caregivers make the music. Everyone sings, chants, taps, bounces and moves, not just the teacher.

• Songs and activities repeat from week to week, so children can absorb them and eventually join in.

• There's a predictable routine with a familiar opening, closing and flow, so toddlers know what's coming.

• Movement is built in, not treated as a problem to manage.

• Caregivers are participants, not spectators on the sidelines.

This isn't just a teaching preference. In a study at McMaster University, 6-month-olds were randomly assigned to six months of either an active music class — where babies and parents sang, moved and played instruments together — or a passive class where music played in the background while families did other activities. The babies in the active classes developed a better sense of musical pitch structure, more communicative gestures like pointing and waving, and more positive social behavior (Gerry, Unrau & Trainor, 2012; summary). The researchers specifically highlighted how important it was that parents took an active role. Participation — yours and theirs — is the point.

So what should you do when your toddler wanders?

But what about classroom skills? Don't toddlers need to learn to listen, take turns and sit still? Absolutely — and there's actually quite a bit caregivers can do in class to nurture these kindergarten-ready skills.

1. Show them what to do. The single most powerful thing you can do is model it. Look at the teacher. Sing, tap or move when the teacher asks. Your child is watching you far more closely than they're watching the teacher.

2. Listen with your body. If your child tries to chat with you during an activity, show them through your body language that you're listening to the teacher — eyes forward, a gentle smile, keep singing. You can always talk about it in a moment.

3. Let them wander a little, then invite them back playfully. When your toddler gets up, give them some room. Then draw them back by engaging in a silly, fun way with the activity itself: tap the drum right where they can see it, bounce with exaggerated joy, make the scarf "fly" toward them. You may have to do this a lot during the toddler years, and that's okay.

4. Don't rush. Sometimes if you give a child a minute to walk around, they'll surprise you with how they respond to the music.

That last one matters more than it seems, because toddlers need far more time than adults to process what they hear. Research on toddler conversation finds that one-year-olds' responses can still be on-topic when they start more than 4 seconds after an adult finishes speaking — many times longer than an adult would take — and even 3-year-olds can take up to ten times longer than adults to respond (review in the Journal of Child Language). And that's just answering a simple question. In music class, a toddler has to take in the music, the words and the movement, then figure out what their own body should do. It can take a long time, and sometimes they'll get it "wrong," because they're learning.

That's why toddlers learn best from adults participating, routine and repetition. Yes, they learn from other children too. But if the other children aren't on task (and at this age, they often aren't!), watching several adults happily engaged is incredibly helpful.

Absorb first, participate later

It's natural to want to see your toddler clap or tap along. Those are the visible signs of participation, and they feel like proof that class is "working." But what we're really looking for at this age is for children to absorb the music first and participate when they're ready.

One of my favorite things to watch is a toddler who listens for a while, does the activity for a few seconds, goes back to listening, and then tries again. That back-and-forth is the learning. They're taking the music in, testing it out with their own body, and going back to gather more.

When we cajole them with words — "Tap, sweetie! Come on, tap like this! Can you sing?" — we interrupt that process. All that talking competes with the very music we want them to hear. Instead, keep the music going yourself, and trust that it's landing.

The wandering is part of the music

If your toddler spends half of class exploring the room, you haven't done anything wrong, and neither have they. They're doing exactly what toddlers are built to do: learning to move their bodies while soaking up everything around them. Your job is simple and joyful. Show up, sing, move, model, and give them time.

The payoff often arrives when you least expect it — at bath time, in the stroller, in the middle of breakfast — when a little voice starts singing the lullaby you were sure they never heard.

Join Our Baby and Toddler Music Classes in Gramercy

If you're in Gramercy or nearby and looking for a music class where toddlers are free to move and learn, I'd love to have you join one of my Musikgarten classes. Come sing with us!

Sources

• Akhtar, N., Jipson, J., & Callanan, M. A. (2001). Learning words through overhearing. Child Development, 72(2), 416–430.

• Martínez-Sussmann, C., Akhtar, N., Diesendruck, G., & Markson, L. (2010). Orienting to third-party conversations. Journal of Child Language.

• Gerry, D., Unrau, A., & Trainor, L. J. (2012). Active music classes in infancy enhance musical, communicative and social development. Developmental Science, 15(3), 398–407.

• Turn-taking, timing, and planning in early language acquisition. Journal of Child Language (published online 2015).