It is difficult to overestimate the importance of musical toys in the life of every child. With their help, you can develop not only the usual musical skills, but also such personal qualities as patience, attentiveness and perseverance. In addition, musical toys for children are used in many therapies against stuttering, speech stumbling and excessive nervousness of a child.
When purchasing a child's musical toy, you should always understand its features. So, each of them will help to develop some specific qualities or skills (some develop motor skills, others - breathing, and third - musical abilities). The overall quality of all toys - they help to lure the child into the game when it is needed. For convenience of further classification, it is very conditional to divide all musical toys for children into two large groups: general developing toys and toys, which develop specifically the ear for music and musical abilities.
Generally developing musical toys
To such toys can be attributed virtually everything that can just make a sound. The task, which, as a rule, is set for them, is simply to attract the attention of the child and to keep his interest for as long as possible.
These toys include:
- Completely simplified copies of children's folk instruments:
- primitive whistles,
- ratchets
- rattles.
- traditional music boxes and street organ;
- special self-sounding mechanical devices (for example, simulators of animal voices and birds singing, as well as a talking alphabet with recorded songs).
Of course, even a rattle can ring with a certain ordered rhythm. But by themselves, these tools do not provoke their ability to increase interest in learning music. They are either not able to change their sound (as completely self-sounding), or they are limited in this (for example, a whistle can make a sound of different volume and duration, but only one pitch and tone).
Toys developing musical abilities
Among the developing toys most often there are simplified copies of real musical instruments. And since virtually any musical instrument can be represented as a toy, the choice among them is simply huge.
Their main advantage is that if the child learns to control the sound being extracted (to choose certain notes of sound, volume, order), then later he will more easily master the corresponding musical instrument. Thus, such toys can be considered as a preparatory stage in obtaining special education.
And if such a goal is in the interests of the parents, then they should be more attentive to the choice of developing musical toys. The most important criteria for this should be, of course, the personal preferences of the child. All musical toys for children develop an ear for music, but some of them have a greater influence on the development of a sense of rhythm, while others have more melodic hearing.
To develop a sense of rhythm in a child will help lessons and games with drums, castanets, tambourines, maracas, wooden spoons and others. As a rule, children like these musical rhythmic toys very much because of the simplicity in handling them.
And almost all the melodious sounding children's toys can be attributed to the developing sound pitch. And this, as a rule, all sorts of wind and string instruments. But there are some exceptions. For example, the same xylophone, although it is a percussion instrument, due to its melody refers to this group of toys.
Of all the musical toys for children I want to particularly highlight children's synthesizers. They are attractive by the wealth of their capabilities. Firstly, it is a variety of different timbres and rhythms. Secondly, several tunes are usually recorded in the memory of the device, attracting children's attention - in most cases they are very popular with children who try to pick them up by ear. Thirdly, the recording function is available on this instrument, self-indulgence with recording your own game can also seriously entice a child, prompting him to new musical experiments.
But regardless of their characteristics, absolutely all musical toys for children benefit and make the development of the child more versatile and harmonious. It is only important that they just be!
By the way, the instrument depicted in the picture is called kalimba - this is one of the most ancient musical instruments of the peoples of Africa, which touches with its simplicity and melody. You can listen to how kalimba sounds in this video - the performer will play the Ukrainian folk song “Shchedryk” on kalimba. Beauty!
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