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Find a resource that suits you and do something every day - even if for only five minutes.

Establish clear rules from day one

If they can listen, they can respond, and they can learn. Teach them about “space bubbles”. Have them stand with arms outstretched and gently swing around. No-one is allowed to go inside their space bubble.

Young children learn by doing.

Music at this age is music and movement. This will incorporate story telling through use of percussion instruments or drama; it will involve dance and action songs and also singing. It will also involve interpretive movement - play some gentle classical music and use scarves to stimulate the imagination.

This will stimulate and integrate right and left sides of the brain.

Include motor co-ordination activities.

This subject is the topic of a great body of research. Children today are generally not physically active enough to get sufficient stimulation to establish neural pathways. If you can do something daily in the way of motor skills, especially cross-patterning activities conducted to music, it will help enormously.

Relate activities to their level of understanding. Engage their imaginations. They live in a fantasy world ‘ take advantage of it.

Praise them often.

It never occurs to the child, or anyone else, that you have to get it perfect the first time. Everyone encourages them which is an added bonus. Somehow along the way though, by the time many children are in mid primary school, they have already been given so many negatives which erode their self-esteem that they give up trying new things.

Remember the K.I.S.S. principle and Keep It Simple Sunshine

Only do a few activities or songs at a time in your music lesson. Repeat them often and only when mastered do you add modifications or a new activity. Keep the whole lesson simple but fun. Do not confuse simple with easy. If the class structure is simple, you can easily add in a more challenging activity.

Repeat the lesson (maybe up to three or four times) until confidence and competence improve. They need the repetition. You can add modifications for greater complexity and variation or change one or two activities before moving onto a new lesson. Set them up to succeed.

Observe the children’s ability to perform the skills in movement, music, drama, listening and social interaction. The music lesson thus contains so many more outcomes. You are then leveraging your time by combining learning areas. That is why the movements need to be modeled appropriately.

Finish each session with stretching and relaxation

Give them permission to be still and silent and teach them how. They need it.

I pointed out that the country that has some of the best literacy results in the OECD is Finland, a country where just 9 years of school education is compulsory and where it doesn’t start till age 7!

But by the time they are toddlers, Latino children trail their white counterparts by up to six months in understanding words, speaking in more complex sentences and performing such simple tasks as assembling puzzles.

The findings from researchers at UC Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Pittsburgh are based on a nationwide tracking study of more than 8,000 children born in 2001 and are being published in the Maternal and Child Health Journal and the medical journal Pediatrics.

Past studies have documented disparities between Latino children and their white peers in kindergarten and persistent achievement gaps in later grades. The new findings pinpoint the beginnings of those gaps at an earlier age than previously thought. They also highlight the urgency of early intervention -- children in preschool programs such as Head Start may already be at a disadvantage, researchers said.

"Cognitive skills and language during toddler years are a strong predictor of who will do well in kindergarten and early elementary grades," said study co-author Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley. "These early lags in learning need to be addressed in a sensitive and respectful fashion, but they need to be addressed early on."

Fuller and his colleagues attribute part of the paradox to larger Latino families, which could result in individual children receiving less attention from their parents. A bigger issue, researchers say, is that poor Latino mothers tend to be less educated than women in other groups. Studies have found that undereducated parents read fewer books and share fewer stories with their children, which is fundamental for later literacy skills.

Maternal education is the best predictor," said Eugene Garcia, a professor of education at Arizona State University, who reviewed the new studies but is not connected with them. "If moms are educated pretty well, their kids are going to be pretty well educated."

Many Latino families don't view themselves as their children's first teachers, assigning that role to schools, said study co-author Alice Kuo, a UCLA assistant professor of pediatrics.

The irony, she said, is that these families are seeking a better education for their children, but pressures to work and assimilate may hinder that goal.

Norma Elizabeth Ochoa, a Whittier mother, said she hopes that such funding can expand programs such as Abriendo Puertas, a parent-training program run by the nonprofit group Families in Schools that she attended earlier this year. The classes helped her and husband, Octavio, with their children, Octavio Jr., 10 and Diego, 3.

Depending on the experiment, people spend up to half their time not thinking about the task at hand—even when they’ve been told explicitly to pay attention.

As last week's report itself states, we need more research on exactly how play is embraced, or not, in kindergarten classrooms. There is much more to unpack from the data it has collected (particularly in its discussion of standardized tests), and much more to learn generally about how to balance playtime in kindergarten with circle time, one-on-one conversation, inquiry-based science experiences, guided reading, the use of math "manipulatives" like beads and bears, as well as art and music. With innovative teachers, many of these components can be threaded into playtime or can lead to playful, child-directed activities. That is why high-quality professional development is crucial. New ideas for better integrating playtime into the classroom routine are needed. Early Ed Watch will be tracking the issue of playtime closely over the next several months to provide more insights from leading researchers in this field, helping educators and policymakers ensure that positive playtime is part of the picture.