Children love good tunes and songs. They help their IQ as well

Many of us remember having nursery rhymes sung to us by our mothers when we were young. For centuries, people have always known that children love good tunes, especially if they can learn words to go with them. Recent research has shown that after teaching your children the nursery rhymes, you would be well advised to follow up with folk songs, then the popular classics. The children may discover classical music and enjoy it for the rest of their lives. And it may enhance their ability to learn in other subjects, and even enhance their IQ!.

Classical Music is good for children's brain development and their IQ
Mozart and Beethoven are good for the brain - and that's official. In the United States, anyway. Experts say that good music can stimulate a child's development. In Florida all state-funded pre-schools are now required to play classical music by law, and hospitals have started giving away classical CDs to new mums.
BBC web site Tuesday, August 17, 1999

Researchers have found the first evidence that young children who take music lessons show different brain development and improved memory over the course of a year compared to children who do not receive musical training.The findings, published in the online edition of the journal Brain, show that not only do the brains of musically-trained children respond to music in a different way to those of the untrained children, but also that the training improves their memory as well. After one year the musically trained children performed better in a memory test that is correlated with general intelligence skills such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ.
ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2006) E Glenn Schellenberg - Music Lessons enhance IQ

Children love recognizing tunes.
A US home school magazine which recommends a music curriculum says that, in order to listen to classical music with understanding and pleasure, children, as well as adults, must recognize the main themes, the melodies. The children like the tunes, especially if there are words, or if you make up some amusing words to fit the tune. It also helped a lot when the names of both composer and composition were incorporated into the words. These were the themes the children asked to sing again and again. They loved them, remembered them, and wanted to play them on an instrument. One place you can find over 1100 good tunes for your children to listen to is Musical Discovery Themes, available on a 14 day free trial. This is a dictionary of musical themes, with quizes, juke boxes, hit parade lists, a virtual piano for identifying tunes, and lots of other stimulating things to interest your children.

Marjorie Persons - The Old Schoolhouse Magazine