Why Kindermusik of Cleveland?

Philosophy

Kindermusik's philosophy is founded upon rigorous research and our fundamental beliefs:

A parent or loving caregiver is a child’s first and most important teacher.
All children are musical.
The home is the most important learning environment.
Music nurtures a child's cognitive, emotional, social, language, and physical development.
Children flourish in a child-centered environment where activities are developmentally appropriate.
Educators value the learning process—not the performance—
of music making.
Every child should experience the joy, fun, and learning that music brings to life.

Research shows music helps children become better learners, and that even a newborn emotionally responds to music. Parents respond, too: 99% of Kindermusik parents would recommend the classes to other parents*.

With 30 years experience in developing early learning curricula and products, Kindermusik is the world’s most trusted name in music and movement classes for children newborn to seven. Kindermusik curricula are based upon the principles of early development applied to developmentally appropriate practice as defined by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Plus, the Kindermusik philosophy is rooted in the work of early childhood development experts like Piaget, Montessori, and Greenspan.

Our full curricula offer your child seven years of musical learning that involves every aspect of your child’s growth and development: language, motor skills, social skills, cognitive development, emotional growth, and musicality. Throughout the Kindermusik experience, a trusted and trained Educator will guide you and your child through every musical and developmental milestone and help you understand what is happening all along the way. Each semester, a new set of At Home Materials brings the experience out of the classroom and into your every day routines and rituals.

Come experience for yourself why more parents around the world choose Kindermusik than any other music and movement program.

(*Harris Interactive, November 2005)

Research

Benefits for Young Children

Don Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect, traced neurological development during childhood and found prior to a major spurt of neural integration in the brain during the elementary school years, learning occurs through movement and quick emotional associations. For example, by age two, the brain has begun to fuse with the body via marching, dancing, and developing a sense of physical rhythm. The more music children are exposed to before they enter school, the more deeply this stage of neural coding will assist them throughout their lives.

Benefits of Parental Involvement

Findings from a study conducted by three researchers at Sam Houston State University in Texas reports that early music training can improve intelligence, and the amount of parental involvement in the music training can greatly affect the amount of improvement. Strong correlations were found between musical abilities in young children, particularly the ability to match vocal pitches and reproduce rhythmic patterns and abstract reasoning abilities.

The study also showed that parental time spent with a child is a more important factor in predicting intelligence test success than such factors as single-parent households, poverty, low parental education levels and ethnic minority status.

Benefits for School Aged Children

Arts education makes a tremendous impact on the developmental growth of every child and has proven to help level the "learning field" across socio-economic boundaries, states the Involvement in the Arts and Success in Secondary School, James S. Catterall, The UCLA Imagination Project, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, UCLA, Americans for the Arts Monograph, January 1998.

Arts education has a measurable impact on youth at risk in deterring delinquent behavior and truancy problems while also increasing overall academic performance among those youth engaged in after school and summer arts programs targeted toward delinquency prevention, according to the YouthARTS Development Project, 1996, U.S. Department of Justice, National Endowment for the Arts, and Americans for the Arts.

Benefits of Community-based Arts

Findings from the Living the Arts Through Language + Learning: A Report on Community-Based Youth Organizations, Shirley Brice Heath, Stanford University and Carnegie Foundation For the Advancement of Teaching, Americans for the Arts Monograph, November 1998 reports that:

Young people who participate in the arts for at least three hours a day, three days a week for at least one year are:

4 times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement.
3 times more likely to be elected to class office within their schools.
4 times more likely to participate in a math and science fair.
3 times more likely to win an award for school attendance.
4 times more likely to win an award for writing an essay or poem.

Young artists, as compared with their peers, are likely to:

Read for pleasure nearly twice as often.
Perform community service more than four times as often.
Participate in youth groups nearly four times as frequently.
Attend music, art and dance classes nearly three times as frequently.