Music & the Brain

The RockStarts® curriculum has been fine-tuned over two decades to maximize the impact a short lesson can have on a child.  Mixing music with movement, while activating imagination and creative expression, engages every corner of our students' bodies and brains.

 FAMILIAR & ORIGINAL MUSIC

• Exposure to familiar music activates the hippocampus (our memory center)
• Listening to & recalling lyrics invokes language centers in the temporal & frontal lobes

 MUSICAL THEORY

• Even in our infant rockstars, tapping, bopping, dancing and drumming along with music involves the cerebellum’s timing circuits
• For our Big Kids, reading music involves the visual cortex in the occipital lobe

Performance & participation

• Performing music involves the frontal lobe to plan behavior, and engages the motor and sensory cortex with the brain's memory and language centers
• Music - specifically song - is one of the best training grounds for babies learning to recognize the tones that add up to spoken language

WORLD LANGUAGE INTRODUCTIONS

• Learning even a few words in two dozen languages exposes children to a wide variety of the world's sounds, diction, and cadences
• Songs from around the world demonstrate the universality of the human race, and broaden our awareness of the world around us