The earliest stages of learning for young children are the most important. The fundamentals of learning are instilled into a child at a very young age. How much importance is placed on these fundamentals can have dramatic affects on the future of the child's learning. Music, when applied in a constructive way, can have positive effects on a child's ability to learning and can help them in many ways. One way that music can make learning easier for a young child is by implementing music lessons into a child's normal activities. A small study was done two years back involving ten three-year-olds who were tested on their ability to put together a puzzle and the speed at which they could do it ("Learning Keys" 24). After the initial test was taken, five of the children were given singing lessons for 30 minutes a day and the other five were given piano lessons for 15 minutes a week (24). The lessons were conducted over a six- month period of time, and after the six months, all of the kids showed substantial improvement in the speed at which they could put together the puzzle (24). The researchers understand this skill in putting pieces of a puzzle together as the same reasoning that engineers, chess players and high-level mathematicians use. In this study of inner-city kids, their initial scores were below the national average, but afterwards their scores nearly doubled (24). The term given to this type of reasoning and thought that goes into putting pieces of a puzzle together is called abstract reasoning. By teaching music, people exercise the same abstract reasoning skills that they use for doing math or some other exercise in which the people have to visualize in their head. An eight month study was conducted by Frances H. Rauscher of the University of California at Irvine. In this study, nineteen preschoolers, ranging in age from three to five, received weekly keyboard and daily singing lessons while another fivteen preschool...
