Like many others, I was impressed and delighted by "ukulele boy" doing Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours"
As a music educator, I see a very powerful example of musical development. Lets set aside this child's excellent ukelele playing abilities and focus on his singing....what we hear is a child singing with extremely good intonation (i.e. singing in tune) but NOT using real words. There's a recognizable word here and there but generally, he uses vocables of his own invention to imitate Mr. Mraz. Its this precise reason that Music Together®'s song collections include many songs without words. Focusing on the syntactic meaning of the text can be distracting to kids that may not have developed their language skills completely...therefore singing on "la" or even a single word repeated "clapping clapping clapping... etc" will allow them to tune in to the pitches with more clarity.
There are always a few examples of "songs without words" in every MT class. These songs are also great for parents to make their own outside of class; its easy to replace your child's name, favorite food, etc. as the "words" to the song to have be a special musical moment for your child.
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