Professor Hanna on Learning Language of Music: Is It Child's Play?

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS -- Wendell Hanna is professor of music education at San Francisco State University. She has taught over the last 20 years in K – 12 music classrooms and is an early-childhood music specialist. She wrote this blog post on how play can be used to teach music to children. “The Italian Reggio Emilia approach is now considered the most progressive and desirable early-childhood educational approach in the world. These schools value children’s innate abilities and nurture artistic and creative intelligences through play-based emersion in the “poetic languages” such as visual arts, music, poetry, dance, drama or photography. But how might a particular language, such as music, be taught in playful and natural ways that honor a child’s inborn abilities for language learning?”