A researcher at Ben-Gurion University conducted the first study of hand-clapping songs, uncovering a direct link between those activities and the development of important skills in children and young adults, including university students.
"We found that children in the first, second and third grades who sing these songs prove skills absent in children who don't take part in similar activities," explains Dr. Idit Sulkin. "We also found that children who naturally perform hand-clapping songs in the yard during break have neater handwriting, write better and make fewer spelling errors." As part of the study, Sulkin went to several elementary school classrooms and engaged the children in either a board of education conducting music appreciation program or hand-clapping songs training — each lasting a period of 10 weeks.
"Within a very short period of time, the children who until then hadn't taken part in such activities caught up in their cognitive abilities to those who did," she said. But this finding only surfaced for the group of children undergoing hand-clapping songs training. The result led Sulkin to conclude that hand-clapping songs should be made a necessary part of education for children aged 6 to 10, for the purpose of motor and cognitive training.
During the study, Dr. Sulkin interviewed school and kindergarten teachers, visited their classrooms and joined the children in singing. Her goal was to figure out why children are fascinated by singing and clapping up until the end of third grade, when these entertainments are abruptly abandoned and replaced with sports. "This fact explains a developmental process the children are going through," Dr. Sulkin observes. "The hand-clapping songs appear naturally in children's lives at the age of 7, and disappear at the age of 10."
Sulkin says that no in-depth, long-term study has been conducted on the effects that hand-clapping songs have on children's motor and cognitive skills. However, the relationship between music and intellectual development in children has been studied extensively, causing countless parents to obtain a "Baby Mozart" CD for their children.
