Educación musical: estrategia para el desarrollo cognitivo del preescolar

The Mexican Pre-school Education Program (PEP) includes music aspects which are in the same artistic appreciation and expression realm, along with theatre, dancing and visual arts. Musical content is basic for preschool grades 1-3. Music education in not included in the curriculum as a part of an integral preschooler formation, but rather it´s given special attention to the cognitive aspects focused on science and language. The objective of this research is to know the relation between music education elements and preschooler’s cognitive development. Methodology. The research design is quantitative, cross-sectional and correlational. A survey was applied to 306 preschool teachers, working in the public and private school system in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico. The results were gathered into a database and processed in a statistic sheet, reading correlation results between simple variables. Contribution The results demonstrated that, there is certain relationship between music theory elements and thinking skills development, such as classification, seriation, and number conservation, as well as the reflective abstraction. Also, Dalcroze, Kodaly, Orff and Gordon´s music pedagogical principles, used to teach music, which benefit over the thinking abilities, such as learning through the senses. Also, it was found a relationship between playing a musical instrument, singing songs that involve word addition or subtraction, with reversibility and knowledge construction thinking.