Music is one of life's greatest pleasures. Like many children, my son was drawn to music long before he learnt to talk. When he was 18 months he would sit mesmerized through instrumentals and classical recitals listening to live performances. Now as a toddler, tabla and harmonium continue to fascinate him and his typical pastime on any given day involves listening to his favorite music or playing an instrument in sangat i.e. accompanied on another instrument by his grandmother whom he lovingly calls “Dabee”. For only being 3 he has an unbelievable memory and can remember lyrics and rhythm and oftentimes I find him singing words in tunes he made up on his own.

Any early exposure to music that our child got would be attributed purely to our love for the art form as a family. Insights into the Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory and the importance of beginning a child’s musical experience at a young age came much later; and with it the realization that music has a huge untapped potential that can be exploited.

Reading into the music research, I learnt that playing music increases children’s reasoning capacity as well as improves their time management skills, concentration span and self expression. The most surprising discovery for me was the well established relationship between children’s learning and music. Literature endorsed further that the integration of music has shown that educational content in school or at home is learnt more effectively and children are seen to be happier and enjoying the learning and play environments that have a strong element of music.

Despite its many claims to fame, I find music to be by and large marginalized in home setting and by most schools as just one of the many activities to be not very productive. One argument says that music and generally play has become an expensive luxury. This really is just half the truth. Just like the toys that children typically like to play with are often the simplest things and the expensive and high-tech toys that parents impose upon their children are rarely picked up after the novelty wears off. In the early ages specially, orienting the children to music and instruments is not really a costly affair. My son plays a range of homemade percussion instruments including pots and pans, spoons, empty containers, and rattles and shakers which can be made by putting small stones or dry lentils in empty plastic bottles.

Truthfully there is nothing like a joyous relationship with music that can last a lifetime. As a parent or a grandparent, your active interest and support will not only encourage your child's love of music but will seek to nurture this natural tendency and mould it into a module for acquiring knowledge.

At every age, provide your child with regular opportunities to:

1. hear, sing or play music in relaxed family settings
2. enjoy simple rhythmic and melodic instruments and explore their sounds
3. take part in music events that relate directly to the child's own culture and that involve distinctly different cultures
4. play music for you and receive encouragement for his or her efforts and achievements

Throughout the magazine we have spoken about the value of play and the importance it has in the overall development of the child. As a parent of a child, the following table is designed to help you understand about the different forms of play children engage themselves in during their early years and how you can support them by providing developmentally appropriate materials, time and space.

Kind of Play	Description	Age Range
Exploratory play/object play/ sensory play	Very young children explore objects and environments – touching, mouthing, tossing, banging, squeezing. Sensory play appears in children’s early attempts to feed themselves. As they get older, materials like play-dough, clay, and paint add to sensory-play experiences.	0–2.5 years
Dramatic play (solitary pretense)	Many young children spend a lot of time engaged in imaginative play by themselves throughout the early childhood years. They invent scripts and play many roles simultaneously. Toys or props, (e.g., dolls, cars, action figures) usually support this kind of play. As children get older, they create entire worlds in solitary pretense, often with large collections of small objects or miniature figures.	3–8 years
Construction play	Children begin to build and construct with commercial toys (blocks), with recycled materials (cardboard boxes, plastic tubing) and with a variety of modeling media (clay, play-dough, plasticine). Older children play for extended periods with complex commercial model sets. Children across the age range engage in this kind of play by themselves and in groups, often combining it with episodes of solitary pretense or socio-dramatic play.	3–8 years
Physical play	Sensory-motor play begins as young infants discover they can make objects move; e.g., kicking the figures on a crib mobile or crawling after a rolling ball. Physical play in the preschool years often involves rough-and-tumble play, a unique form of social play most popular amongst little boys. Rough and tumble play describes a series of behaviors used by children in play fighting. Adults often mistake it as aggression. Older preschoolers engage in vigorous physical activity, testing the boundaries of their strength by running, climbing, sliding, and jumping, individually and in groups. This kind of play often develops spontaneously into games with invented rules.	3–8 years
Socio-dramatic play	During pretend play with peers – children take on social roles and invent increasingly complex narrative scripts, which they enact with friends in small groups.	3–6 years
Games with rules	Children begin to play formal games in social groups. These games have fixed, predetermined rules; e.g., card games, board games, soccer, and hockey.	5 years and up
Games with invented rules	Children begin to invent their own games and/or modify the rules of traditional playground games in their self-organized playgroups; e.g. hide-and seek, hopscotch etc.	5–8 years