8 ideas to teach music at home

You don't need to be the best singer in the world to sing to your children. When tiny, it's a fantastic way of bonding and singing them to sleep, and even introducing rhythm as you rock them.

Singing together is the best fun. Teaching them songs, singing along to the radio or recordings, and encouraging them to listen and sing along never fails.

Try teaching them to whistle. Start with the lip position and practice, practice, practice! In no time, they'll be whistling tunes they know.

Using colours is a great way of teaching children to read music, and a fantastic building block for learning to read and interpret music.  Think how hard it is to look at a black and white piano keyboard, and a black and white page of mjusic and try to see the connection between them.

Soundbops, for example, uses coloured bops that children can place on the Soundbops board. And each bop is a different note, and each note in our simple notation is the same colour. So the note C is red, and the bop is red. It's so much easier to grasp the meaning.

Using a system of colours for each note and the same on a printed sheet gives children their first introduction to reading and playing music. Try putting coloured stickers on a keyboard, and using the same colours to write out the tune.

Making your own instruments is great creative fun, and lets you and your children explore different aspects of music.

Try creating shakers with rice or pasta in empty jars, or crisp canisters. Fill glasses or bottles with varying volumes of water for a make-shift xylophone.

Best of all, use a shoe or tissue box and varying sizes of elastic bands to make a guitar. Cut a hole in the box and stretch the bands across it. Here's one we made earlier.

Encourage your children to listen to sounds on trips to school, or shopping, or visiting family. What does a trip to the park or playground sound like? How many noises can be made into music?

Tooting horns, the rhythm of traffic, or the noise of a train crossing a junction - everything is an inspiration, on foot, in a car or on a bus.

Listen and explore how you can make those sounds at home. You can compose a journey symphony, using beats, voice and whatever you can find around the house - use saucepans as a drum set or use your shakers.

Listen to a piece of music. Draw what you hear, or what the music makes you think and feel. Or talk about the music. It's a great way of exploring vocabulary and emotions.

Build a gallery of musical paintings - listen to different types of music and use paints, crayons, felt tips or pencils to allow your children to follow their imagination.

You can explore what types of music to which your child really responds, and discover what instruments appeal to them. You can produce prints or outlines of instruments and musical scenes and colour them in, so your child gets to know what different intruments look like, and what sounds they produce.

Play music to your children in the background of daily activities and let them associate being happy with music. Play while you cook, or on a road trip. You'll be creating memories that will be recalled in the future, reinforcing their love of music.

Play musical games at parties or with friends or just with you and them. Try clapping games like B-I-N-G-O, or musical chairs. Play 'what comes next' games to learn songs and lyrics.

And, best of all, let them play music with the instruments you have. It may be a Soundbops, a tambourine, a recorder or a shoe-box guitar, but letting children experiment with music is unbeatable.

Go on that musical journey together. Teachers use modelling activities to teach children by example, and it's a brilliant way to teach. Discovering music together means your child has an example and will associate those positive learning experiences with you.

You could learn an instrument alongside them, or sing with them.  Colour musical pictures with them. Play musical games. Teach them to whistle or learn the building blocks of music with the Soundbops system.  Learning lyrics together will help them  extend their vocabulary and understanding of words.

We teach children about colours, and numbers and letters - all the fundaments of reading and counting, and music, too. What we don't teach them about is pitch - how the letters represent different sounds. 

Perfect pitch turns out to be a bit of a myth. It's just memory. One in 10,000 people have this skill innately, but like any skill, it can be taught. And, like language, which it is closely related to, it has a critical period - it needs to be learnt before the age of 5 or 6.

The Soundbops system and isntrument teaches the connection between notation, keys and do-re-mi, giving children the skills to identify pitch.

Interestingly, Professor Diana Deutsch has shown that children learning languages based on tone and pitch (like Mandarin) are 6 or 7 times more likely to have perfect pitch than English speakers. That's why we need to coach English speakers more.