Exercises for hearing development

Before describing exercises for developing hearing, it is necessary to define some basic concepts. Hearing - what is it?

Our ears pick up sound vibrations that are transmitted to a specific part of the brain in the form of nerve impulses. Hearing, as well as vision, give a person an idea of the world around them, broaden their horizons, help them navigate in space, and make life bright and fulfilling.

An important characteristic of hearing is its acuity, determined by the minimum indicators that provoke the sensation of sound. In this article, we will talk about whether it is possible to develop auditory sensitivity (including musical sensitivity).

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Exercises for developing phonemic hearing

Phonemic (speech) hearing is the ability to catch and identify the sound (phonemes) of native speech, to determine the semantic load of words, sentences, texts. This type of hearing allows you to distinguish the volume of conversation, intonation, voice timbre.

They say that a child receives absolute pitch from birth. However, without maintaining and developing it, with age the "absoluteness" gradually fades away. To prevent this from happening, hearing must be developed comprehensively.

An unborn child is able to hear a huge number of sounds. Among them are the contractions of the mother's heart, the noise of amniotic fluid, external sounds. At birth, a baby is able to hear even things that an adult is unlikely to pay attention to. The peculiarity of an adult is to focus attention only on those sound options that are necessary at the moment, while completely ignoring the rest. A newborn child does not yet know how to focus his attention and divide sounds into necessary and unnecessary. He must learn this.

Phonemic hearing helps to distinguish individual sounds from ordinary noise. To begin with, the baby begins to identify individual sounds that he hears most often: these are the voices of parents, his own name. That is why the first word spoken by the baby is often the word he hears most often.

If in early childhood the child is surrounded by musical sounds, including lullabies sung by his mother, we can say that in the future the child may also develop an ear for music. Of course, such an ear also needs to be developed: listen to and analyze musical pieces together with the child, master rhythms, which can be achieved by simple playful dances with the child. The child should learn to distinguish kind music from aggressive, cheerful from sad, etc.

What awaits a child if you do not pay attention to the development of his hearing? Let's give an example: a deaf-mute family has a baby who is able to both hear and speak. He does not hear conversation as often as necessary, does not understand its significance in the social world, he loses the ability to distinguish sounds, much less repeat them and use them for his own communication. As a rule, such children either do not know how to speak at all, or do it not well enough.

For the same reasons, it is much easier to learn a foreign language when you are in an environment where everyone around you communicates in that language. Every person has a natural gift for imitation and catching sound differences.

Exercises for developing speech hearing should be carried out starting from the moment when the child begins to react to sounds, first showing him the source of the sound, then explaining what and how allowed to reproduce this sound. How to determine whether your baby's phonemic hearing is sufficiently developed? We will give you several exercises that can be used both as a developmental diagnostic and in a developmental plan. When doing the exercises, take into account the child's age: a three-year-old child may not cope with the last exercise, but if this happens at 6-7 years old, the development of his hearing urgently needs help.

First, you should teach your child to distinguish speech from other sounds.

• What is that sound?

This activity has three difficulty levels:

1. The sound of a rattle, bell or whistle?
2. The sound of keys to an apartment, the sound of a spoon on a plate, or the turning of the pages of a book?
3. A box of matches, sand or pebbles?

• What's the weather like?

An activity in the form of a game, which takes place during a walk on a fine day. An adult gently shakes a rattle (good weather), then shakes it sharply, making a loud sound (it started to rain) and asks the baby to run up and pretend to take shelter from the imaginary rain. It is necessary to explain to the child that he should listen to the sounds of the rattle and, depending on the intensity of the sounds, "walk" or "hide".

• Guess the action.

Several children are sitting on chairs. Their hands are on their knees. An adult hits the drum hard, the children raise their hands up. If the hit is weak, there is no need to raise the hands.

• Guess the instrument.

An adult should introduce children to popular musical instruments. This could be a whistle, guitar, flute, drum, piano. It is necessary to reproduce the sound of each of them. Then the adult hides behind the partition and makes instrumental sounds, and the children must guess which instrument was playing.

• Guess the direction of the sound.

The child closes his eyes, and the adult blows a whistle. The child must determine where the sound is coming from. Without opening his eyes, he must turn around and point in the direction with his hand.

Only when the baby has learned to separate sounds can you move on to further exercises. Now it's time to explain that the same sound can have different sounds:

• a-a-a – we show the doctor the neck;
• a-a-a – we lull the doll to sleep;
• a-a-a – something hurts;
• oh-oh-oh – it’s hard for grandma to carry her bag;
• o-o-o – surprise;
• oh-oh-oh – let's sing a song.

First, the baby learns to repeat sounds independently, then tries to guess what the adult wants to say with this sound.

In order for the baby to easily navigate the variety of different sounds, an adult should tell how a particular sound is reproduced. To do this, it is necessary to demonstrate the importance of lips, tongue, teeth: it is better to use a mirror for this purpose. The baby learns to recognize and pronounce sounds, starting with vowels, gradually complicating the use of consonants.

After mastering such knowledge, it is necessary to begin developing auditory memory - the ability to form words from sounds. Here it is important not only to hear the set of sounds in words, but also to remember their order. You should start with simple short words, pronounced in the following order:

• bim-boom-boom;
• rock-rak-roar;
• toc-toc-tock;
• hand-flour-pike;
• vine-goat-thunderstorm;
• jar-semolina-ranka.

You can ask your child to select the odd one out after listening to a series of words (this is how a sense of rhyme is developed):

• mountain-hole-feather;
• laughter-snow-sun.

You can practice solving riddles, the answer to which must sound in rhyme. For example: a belly on two sides and four ears, and what is her name? Po-dush-ka!

Imagine that you are at a children's competition and are rooting for some team. Clap your hands and say slowly: well done, we will win, have fun, catch up. This way you can teach your child to divide words into syllables.

Such simple game activities will not only be sure to please the baby, but will also expand his phonemic hearing. Starting with simple exercises, you can thus prepare the child for more complex activities.

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Exercises for developing musical ear

Support of musical hearing is required by every person who loves and respects music or is actively engaged in creative work. Let's look at the concepts of relative and absolute pitch.

Notes are, in fact, certain sound signals that differ in frequency. The presence of absolute pitch in a person allows one to accurately separate the main tonality from a multi-frequency reproduction.

The relative form of musical hearing allows one to determine the comparative characteristics of notes and their relationship to each other. In simpler terms, to name the necessary note, such a person needs to hear another, preferably a nearby note.

A huge role in the study of children's musical development belongs to the famous Soviet teacher V. V. Kiryushin, who, instead of boring and incomprehensible solfeggio lessons, read a number of fairy tales he invented to children. Children not only listened with pleasure, but also remembered what was told, because there was so much interesting in the fairy tales: the adventures of kind interval animals, the little bear who grew a turnip, the struggle between dissonance and consonance, the septim dragons with seven heads and much more. Such fairy tales turned out to be extremely effective and allowed the child to master musical literacy with ease and pleasure.

It is possible to start classes according to Kiryushin's scheme practically from the first days of a child's life. There is a lot of material on the Internet about the system of the famous teacher: collections of his fairy tales, musical works for children, classes on independent playing of musical instruments.

Ilana Vin's teaching system is also well received by children. Thus, her book "How the Notes Met" received positive reviews from many music teachers.

In home practice, you can use some simple exercises that subconsciously develop your hearing:

1. When you walk the streets, listen to what passers-by say. Short excerpts from phrases, fragments of words - all this will help you remember sounds in the future and be attentive to them.
2. Try to remember the timbre of the voices of the people you communicate with. What is the essence of such an exercise? Each voice is individual, it has its own inherent features and manner, intonation and pronunciation. This will allow you to identify and remember sound variations. Some people, having barely heard someone else's speech, can accurately determine where a person is from, and even guess many of his personal qualities.
3. A good effect is observed when guessing the person speaking by their voice. This is a kind of game, and even quite curious.
4. Try to identify acquaintances and friends by the sound of their footsteps.
5. Listen to a piece of music and try to sing it from memory, hitting the notes as closely as possible.
6. And finally, memorizing songs: this develops musical memory. When memorizing a piece of music, repeat the unsuccessful part of the melody until you can repeat it without mistakes.

There are also many computer programs aimed at developing musical hearing: “Musical Arcades”, “Ear Master Pro”, “Musical Examiner”, “Ear Gryz”, etc. Such programs should not be considered as the main tool for self-development, but only as a supplement to general training.

Regarding the musical development of a child, it should be noted that often even the most capable children from the point of view of teachers are reluctant to agree to study music. In such cases, there is only one piece of advice: never force the child to study (like, when he grows up, he will say "thank you" himself). Try to interest the child, demonstrate to him the most attractive and fun sides of such activities: the child should develop motivation and personal interest in music.

Exercises for developing phonetic hearing

It is extremely necessary to develop a child after 4 years, activating his speech, expanding his vocabulary, making speech more expressive, training the coherence of statements and the presentation of his emotions and feelings. It is not necessary to force the child to do any exercises for this: it is enough to unobtrusively communicate and play with the child.

Use in your games everything that the child observes around him in everyday life. The child should know not only what a bus is, but also that a bus has a steering wheel, wheels, an engine and an exhaust pipe; a house has a foundation, walls, a roof and a basement. In addition, children should be well oriented not only in the color of objects, but also in their shades: dark blue, pastel, burgundy.

Often ask your child to describe the chosen object, to think of what it can be used for, what it is made of, etc. Ask your child questions: “What can be big?” - “A mountain, an elephant, a house…” - “Can an elephant be bigger than a house? In what cases?” Or: “What can be cold?” - “Winter, ice cream, ice…”. In this way, the child will learn to compare and generalize.

After an adult reads a fairy tale to a child, one should ask leading questions that will not only train his memory, but also form a connection between words and phrases, determine the sequence of phrases and actions. For example, ask: “Where did Little Red Riding Hood go? What did she carry with her in her basket? Was the gray wolf that she met on her way bad or good? Why?” In the same way, you can ask to retell a cartoon plot, the content of a children's play.

A good effect can be observed from inventing your own plot, based, for example, on a picture or a toy. Compare the pictures: “Here is a boy, he is smiling. And here is a puppy, he is playing. The boy is happy that he has a puppy to play with.”

It is useful to record the child's conversation on a dictaphone and then listen to the recording together. Words that the child cannot pronounce should be repeated again.

Exercises for developing hearing will help not only to reproduce sounds intelligently, but also to develop auditory perception, to identify the almost imperceptible difference in sounds. Remember that such a gift is present in the vast majority of children: the task of adults is to preserve and support this ability.

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