Write Catchy and Fun Songs for Children: A Guide for the Nonmusical

Songs and nursery rhymes are a fundamental tool for encouraging your child’s early development skills. A study published in 2016 by the University of Southern California has shown that learning an instrument helps brains develop faster. 

Along with helping the brain develop, music can help with motor, language, literacy skills. In every culture around the world, there are songs used to entertain and teach children. And, despite all these benefits, we probably do them more than anything, because they are fun. 

But what if you’ve sung every song or can’t find any that you like, you should try creating one yourself! Before you start running, you need to crawl, and before you create a song, you need to understand the components of one. 

There is a lot more to music, but this will quick guide start you and your child singing in short order!

Melody: 

To put it simply, melody is that thing you from a song stuck in your head. It’s a series of notes strung together to create an identifiable music movement. Think about how the notes go with the words Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. That’s a melody! 

Lyrics & Rhyme 

They are the words that go along with a melody or rhythm. Lyrics can be complicated or simple; they can tell a story or be one word repeated over and over. They can fall on the beat or off.  More than anything, words can be used to convey a theme or story.

When people talk about rhyme 

They are referring to the times 

When you use words that sound the same 

It's like playing a little game! 

The most basic rhyme is likely the rhyming couplet. It takes words that have similar sounds in them, like rhyme and time, and puts them into a couplet. It follows a structure of A A, B B, C C, etc. Fun fact, English rhyming couplets trace their origin back to the Shakespearean sonnet! 

There are other ways to have rhyme in a song; like half rhymes, or internal rhymes. But You don’t even need to rhyme in a song. It’s all up to you! My general rule of thumb is that if it sounds good, go with it. 

Rhythm 

It’s that thing that gets your head bopping and toes a tapping. For our purposes, it’s probably best to stick to with what is known as 4/4 time or common time: four beats in a measure and a quarter note is one beat. Using basic bath, you can easily speed up or slow down the beat with eighth notes (1/8 of the measure), half notes (½ of the measure), or a whole note (a beat that lasts the whole measure), and so forth. 

Putting it together

The final step is putting these three things together.

Singing with your kids doesn't need to be a production. And what you sing and how you sing doesn't need to be anything more than having fun. Singing with your child is primarily to help their development, to recognize words and sounds, as well as putting a smile on their face.

1. Keep your rhythm in mind. It's the building blocks of music. More than anything, keep it steady.

2. Second, start with your melody. Hum it, whistle it, vocalize it, get used to it.

3. Third, start your words. Try to sing them in the same way you were humming, whistling, or vocalizing your melody. Some words won't fit easily to a melody, so it'll have to either slow the word down, speed it up, or break it apart.

4. Fourth, have fun with it!