You do not need a good voice. You need enthusiasm and the willingness to look slightly foolish, which mothers of three-year-olds have usually already mastered. Children do not judge your sur; they judge your joy.
Equipment
- A phone or small speaker for songs — pre-download them, so the morning does not collapse the moment the network drops.
- Home-made instruments. A channi (strainer) struck with a spoon; a plastic bottle half-filled with rice or chana for a shaker; an upturned tiffin box for a drum; two steel katoris as cymbals. An orchestra for zero rupees.
Musical acting
Sing ‘Old MacDonald’ but stock the farm with Indian animals — haathi, bandar, saanp, mor, gai — and act each one out. Or build a song around a single action: stamping, clapping, spinning, freezing. “Chanda Mama door ke” is a perennial favourite for swaying and winding down.
Songs to sing
- “Nani Teri Morni” — story, animals and a strong beat.
- “Machhli Jal Ki Rani Hai” — actions built right into the words.
- “Lakdi Ki Kaathi”, “Aloo Kachaloo”, “Hathi Raja Kahan Chale” — and whatever your own region sings.
- Simple bhajans, regional lullabies and Bal Geet in the home language. Borrow shamelessly from your own grandmother’s repertoire — those songs have survived generations because they work.
Why music is secretly a literacy lesson
Rhyme and rhythm tune a child’s ear to the sounds inside words — that ‘morni’, ‘chhamak’ and ‘damak’ end the same way. This ‘phonological awareness’ is one of the strongest predictors of how easily a child will later learn to read. Clapping out the syllables of a name — A-a-rav, Mee-na — is early literacy disguised as a game. Call-and-response songs, where you sing a line and they echo it, train listening and memory at the same time.
NCF-FS Connect
Songs and rhymes and music and movement are named, in those words, in the NCF-FS pedagogy menu. Singing in the matribhasha honours the framework’s insistence that early learning be rooted in the child’s home language and local culture.
Rhyme and rhythm grow phonological awareness, a core thread of language and literacy development and of the FLN mission. Music also serves aesthetic and cultural development and the sheer ananda — joy — that the framework treats as developmentally serious, not frivolous.
About the authors
Rewati Raman Vishewar
M.Ed. (ECCE) & MBA, pursuing a Ph.D. in the Sociology of Childhood. His ECCE research with the Square Panda Foundation was submitted to the Ministry of Women & Child Development; his Bihar ICDS curriculum review was accepted at Ambedkar University Delhi. Two decades across premium, company-owned and chain preschools.
Abhidha Seth
Gold-medal M.Sc. (Child Development) and Assistant Professor; former Head of the Delhi Government Preschool Project. Has worked with NCERT, Ambedkar University Delhi, CECED and MS University Baroda, and set up premium preschools across Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Pune and Mumbai.
Work directly with Rewati Raman Vishewar
Most preschool curricula are
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