Description:
Parents and teachers can enrich their toddlers' lives by encouraging and playing music with them. Research proves that:
Human communication skills are helped by exposure to music at an early age--even before birth!
Neurologically and anthropologically, infants and young children need music as a way to rhythmically organize sounds, and to express emotions and messages.
Every human being is born with a degree of musical potential. But unless this potential is addressed early, a child's musical potential will decrease and finally disappear.
Music is the gift of a lifetime and offers an avenue of creative expression for children, individually and together.
We Like to Play Music is an easy-to-read picture book full of actual photographs of children playing music, moving to a beat and enjoying music alone or with parents or peers. The rhyming text, using the simplest vocabulary, says how everyone can play music. It emphasizes that no special training is needed to shake a rattle, dance to a beat, or even to form your own "band."
Brief description: Kate Parker is a former pre-school teacher and mother of a nine-year-old daughter. She has been playing music live since 1999 and touring Europe as a singer with several bands since 2003. Her husband, Zac, who did the layout for this book, is a drummer with a rock and blues band. They travel together with the bands each summer, and bring their daughter on tour. At home, Kate also organizes a local "Family Band" project in northern Arizona.