Year Four: Years of Miracle and Wonder

As children’s language skills fall into place between the ages of three and four, we can begin to see their first playful make-believe stories coming to life. This is a natural outgrowth of our desire to create and share the narratives of our lives. But it is only the beginning of children’s creative journeys. As they take their next amazing steps in musical scribbling, children will invent entire musical stories, with virtually no instrumental training. As we’ve seen, children are able to tap into musical universals such as high and low, safe or scary, with no instruction. Next, we will see where children take these innate abilities during the fifth year of life—and how this child- motivated playful learning is linked to the creative problem-solving skills that twenty-first-century education specialists are encouraging in schools everywhere.