Lullabies and rocking for babies
Lullabies Wanted - Unacompanied lullabies on CDs
Babies need lullabies sung to them, to help them sleep, to bond with people, and to develop language well.
Lullabies should be unaccompanied, as the playing disracts fro mthe singing,it is more suitable for playing with babies - for example, dancing your lap, and twangs and drumming is not soothing - if bbies need a hearbeat, let it be he soft pulse on a parents' breasst. Too much twanng and drumming music early may not even be good for later deelopment - who has tested this out?
Tell your local chldren's hospital and other baby places of unaccompanied lullabies you know about. Please send any samples to Val Yule, c/- Psychology Department, Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Austalia. 3052
Today one reason why many school beginners have literacy problems is that they have not developed sufficient language or interest in the spoken language and its sounds. I was once called in by a school to assess a child who had arrived with hardly any speech at all. It turned out that his single mother had expected him to learn from television, and did not talk to him because he had not yet learned how to talk back. This is an extreme case, but represents a problem with TV as baby-sitting. Visual always wins over language.
There is a multicultural CD of lullabies (Putamayo) and another beautiful one by Sara-Jordan, but unfortunately the voices are accompanied in a way that reduces soothing properties and preventing babies' interest in language. The media could promote lullaby-singing in many ways. Beginners' reading books could contain lullabies to sing. Unacompanied.
