Nurturing Your Child with Music: How Sound Awareness Creates Happy, Smart, and Confident Children. This item is unavailable.Nurturing Your Child with Music: How Sound Awareness Creates Happy, Smart, and Confident Children

Collects creative methods for introducing music into family life with "music menus" appropriate for preborn through school-aged children

The value of music in the lives of children and adults has been well documented in books and periodicals, one of the most widely read being Don Campbell's The Mozart Effect (Avon, 1997). Here, psychologist Ortiz attempts to follow his Tao of Music with a book filled with exercises and games to stimulate the ear-training necessary for good listening. Unfortunately, his is a wordy and repetitive guide, geared more to child development in general than music in particular. His "Sound Psychology" techniques integrate music of all sorts into everyday activities (brushing teeth, making beds, reading, going to sleep, dining), but he often tell us the obvious (e.g., that music in a young child's room "should echo these positive feelings of warmth and comfort"). At holidays, he suggests Hanukkah songs for Jewish children and cites songs like "Rudolph" and "Jingle Bells," which are hardly Christian in nature, for "Christian children." Even his definitions of musical terms in the appendix tend toward the subjective. Not recommended.
-Linda Beck, Indian Valley P.L., Telford, PA
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