Ball Play in Music Class Teaches Unexpected Skills

You're probably asking yourself: What on earth does playing with a ball have to do with music????  Everything, for little ones!  All kids love playing with balls, and it's a great activity to do with baby to boost early learning.

Kindermusik chime balls are brightly colored and have a little bell inside, so they make a fun jingly sound when tapped or shaken.  With babies, you can tap the ball on their body so they can feel the steady beat, or you can move the ball across their field of vision so that they can track it with their eyes (an important pre-reading skill, whether they are reading words or music notes!)  
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Moving the ball along to the music gives children a visual representation of a steady beat, which helps them learn with multiple senses:  hear it, feel it, see it.  The more senses that are involved in learning an activity, the more likely it is to "stick" in a child's brain.

Using a ball with toddlers teaches turn-taking and hand-eye coordination, an important skill for playing in an ensemble later in life. Preschoolers learn to pass the ball around the circle to the steady beat, and we may even make it more difficult by adding extra balls or changing the tempo (speed) of the song so that they have to coordinate their movements and ball-passing to the beat of the music!