We had a wonderful week moving and jumping and playing and singing together! Welcome to our Lipman families and to Kenneth and Kiersten at PAC!
Keyboard skills-This week we explored the black and white keys of the piano by finding groups of 2 and 3 black keys and exploring these. As Kenneth showed us, you can play many songs using just the black keys, including the start of Amazing Grace. This is because the black keys fall in the pentatonic scale, which is commonly used in children's music and folk music, and is a great place to begin piano exploration. If you have a piano or keyboard at home, consider trying it this week!
Music theory-We also worked with the quarter note and quarter rest symbols, Ta and Shh, making and reading rhythms, exploring an imaginary rainforest, and practicing moving and freezing. Your child took home four rhythm cards which can be cut apart to make quarter notes, quarter rests, and two eighth notes (we haven't introduced this last symbol in class, but we'll get there). Try having your child make a pattern of four note and rest cards and read them by tapping, clapping, or using Ta and Shh.
Theme exploration-Our theme for this first unit is the music of Latin America, and we explored several songs from various Latin American countries, including working on some Spanish vocabulary. The children were thrilled to share their prior knowledge with the group.
To continue this, here is a printable book in Spanish
http://www.hubbardscupboard.org/Spanish_Teacher_Version_At_the_Farm.pdf
and in English
http://www.hubbardscupboard.org/Teacher_Version_28_-_At_the_Farm.pdf
Some of you who registered early received home materials today. If you registered later, your home materials have been ordered, but have not yet arrived. We will get you these as soon as possible. If you did get home materials today, I suggest copying or backing up the CD to your computer or Mp3 player. The more you listen to the CD (in the car is often a wonderful place for this) the more your child will be able to participate in and enjoy class, and it always seems that the CD that is most liked and used is the one that vanishes or is damaged beyond repair. Your home materials also include a home activity guide with a story to share, activities to do, and a panpipes instrument to explore.
Have a great week and enjoy making music together!
Showing posts with label piano for preschoolers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label piano for preschoolers. Show all posts
Monday, September 12, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Beyond the music-Jumping Beans week 1
Welcome to another great Kindermusik semester as we begin exploring Latin American music, learn a little piano, a little music reading, and even a little Spanish in our Jumping Beans unit!
Today we learned quarter notes and quarter rests, put them together to make different rhythm patterns, and played these patterns on the piano. We also started to explore the keyboard, finding black keys, white keys, and patterns of black and white keys. We went into the rainforest to see what we saw, danced to Latin American music, and played a part of a melody on a mallet percussion instrument.
We don't have home materials yet, so please go to play.kindermusik.com and use the digital download card you received in class to download some songs to listen to this week. You might pick ones from class that you especially liked, so that you'll have a digital copy when your home CD arrives, or pick a few others that are good additions to your collection.
Here are some suggestions from class today.
Corre Burriquito
La Cucaracha
Move and Freeze
Mama Paquita
For back to school fun, I also like this album.
I'm the teacher
We still have space for a few more friends in this class and in our Kindermusik classes on Friday and Saturday for younger children as well. If you know of anyone who is interested, please encourage them to come visit us! For more information, they can see http://memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php or contact me
Until next week, have fun making music with kids!
Ms. Donna
Today we learned quarter notes and quarter rests, put them together to make different rhythm patterns, and played these patterns on the piano. We also started to explore the keyboard, finding black keys, white keys, and patterns of black and white keys. We went into the rainforest to see what we saw, danced to Latin American music, and played a part of a melody on a mallet percussion instrument.
We don't have home materials yet, so please go to play.kindermusik.com and use the digital download card you received in class to download some songs to listen to this week. You might pick ones from class that you especially liked, so that you'll have a digital copy when your home CD arrives, or pick a few others that are good additions to your collection.
Here are some suggestions from class today.
Corre Burriquito
La Cucaracha
Move and Freeze
Mama Paquita
For back to school fun, I also like this album.
I'm the teacher
We still have space for a few more friends in this class and in our Kindermusik classes on Friday and Saturday for younger children as well. If you know of anyone who is interested, please encourage them to come visit us! For more information, they can see http://memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php or contact me
Until next week, have fun making music with kids!
Ms. Donna
Beyond the Music-Movin' and Groovin' week 1
Welcome to the family! This week in Family time, we began our exploration of everything related to movement by starting with tempo. Tempo simply means "how fast (or slow) are you going". As children grow and develop, they learn all the ways they can move, from crawling as babies, to walking, to running, until they get to the point that you REALLY wish they'd slow down a little! So, in class we will explore both ways to go, go, go, but also ways to slow, slow, slow down a little, to relax, and to control those growing bodies, even when it's hard.
Please go to play.kindermusik.com and use your play card to download a few songs to share with your child. This will let you start listening to the music while waiting for your home materials to arrive, and will greatly increase your child's enjoyment of and participation in class.
Here are some specific songs from class today:
http://play.kindermusik.com/tracks/4264-lento-y-rapido-slowly-and-quickly/
http://play.kindermusik.com/tracks/4262-hop-up-my-baby/
http://play.kindermusik.com/tracks/3892-riding-the-rails/
And a suggested album
http://play.kindermusik.com/albums/203-zoom-e-oh/
This semester we will also be looking at a lot of different animals and the ways they move. A great purchase to have at home, and a very inexpensive one at this time of year, is a deck of animal picture cards. Target usually has these in the dollar section during the back to school season, with either drawings, photographs or both, and at $1, it's hard to beat the price. This year, along with regular animal cards, they have animal movement and sound cards, which are great, too and musical instrument cards.
My personal favorite visual cards, especially for children who are learning a second (or third) language, are the Lang o Learn picture cards. These are more than a little bit pricey, I'm afraid, at about $10 a set (I've found them as low as $6 a set at teaching stores) but the nice thing about these cards is that not only are they nice, full color photographs of animals, objects, people and the like, but that they're labeled on the back in 17 languages, with pronunciation helps.
This week we listened to a horse galloping and trotting. If you have a chance to visit Shelby Farms, you can often observe horses in action out there, or here are some examples from youtube
Horse galloping
Horse trotting (with background music)
We still have spots for a few more friends in our Friday and Saturday classes. If you know someone who is interested, please invite them to check us out at http://memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php or contact me to set up a preview class
Have fun this week making music with your child!
Please go to play.kindermusik.com and use your play card to download a few songs to share with your child. This will let you start listening to the music while waiting for your home materials to arrive, and will greatly increase your child's enjoyment of and participation in class.
Here are some specific songs from class today:
http://play.kindermusik.com/tracks/4264-lento-y-rapido-slowly-and-quickly/
http://play.kindermusik.com/tracks/4262-hop-up-my-baby/
http://play.kindermusik.com/tracks/3892-riding-the-rails/
And a suggested album
http://play.kindermusik.com/albums/203-zoom-e-oh/
This semester we will also be looking at a lot of different animals and the ways they move. A great purchase to have at home, and a very inexpensive one at this time of year, is a deck of animal picture cards. Target usually has these in the dollar section during the back to school season, with either drawings, photographs or both, and at $1, it's hard to beat the price. This year, along with regular animal cards, they have animal movement and sound cards, which are great, too and musical instrument cards.
My personal favorite visual cards, especially for children who are learning a second (or third) language, are the Lang o Learn picture cards. These are more than a little bit pricey, I'm afraid, at about $10 a set (I've found them as low as $6 a set at teaching stores) but the nice thing about these cards is that not only are they nice, full color photographs of animals, objects, people and the like, but that they're labeled on the back in 17 languages, with pronunciation helps.
This week we listened to a horse galloping and trotting. If you have a chance to visit Shelby Farms, you can often observe horses in action out there, or here are some examples from youtube
Horse galloping
Horse trotting (with background music)
We still have spots for a few more friends in our Friday and Saturday classes. If you know someone who is interested, please invite them to check us out at http://memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php or contact me to set up a preview class
Have fun this week making music with your child!
Friday, August 5, 2011
Kiddies on the Keys-Piano for the extremely young
One of the best parts about being a Kindermusik teacher is that I get to work with very, very young children and their parents, inside a nicely equipped music classroom. And one thing that every single child is drawn to, from the time they can walk, is that great big wood box with black and white keys. And for years, I avoided using it, except maybe occasionally playing a song myself. Even though, at age 2, I'd turn around and find my daughter sitting in someone's studio, plunking keys, there was still some part of me that drew a line that said "they're too young". But part of Kindermusik is exploration, and these kids wanted to explore that big wooden box just as much or more as they wanted to explore the egg shakers, rhythm sticks, or even my big drum. So, taking little steps at a time, I began integrating piano into all my classes. And while I'm not going to suggest that every baby/toddler needs a piano at home, I am going to say that if you have one, avoiding the "No, that's grandma's piano! Don't touch" at age 2-3 may not be the best route to take, especially if you want your child to eventually want to play piano down the road.
Here's a few basic steps for guiding your child's piano/keyboard exploration throughout the years. Most of all, remember-you're not giving a piano lesson. You're having fun. When your child is done, they'll crawl/walk away. Let them.
Start with a label:
When you're dealing with infants and young toddlers, as we do in class, it's not so much what they do as what you, as the parent do. Just as, in a Kindermusik class, we'll sing up high and move the baby up high, you can do the same thing on the piano, playing a few notes up high, and a few down low, and labeling them. The same is true with all those other musical opposites that we explore in class weekly. High/low, fast/slow. As your baby becomes a toddler, he'll probably come to the piano and explore too. And yes, that will be open hand, multi-note at a time banging. But it's exploring and it's musical. Label what's there, and give the child ideas for the future. Melodies will come later.
As toddlers get older, they get more independent. Around age 2, many of my students get shy in class and don't want to come to the piano in the classroom, but still love to watch their parents, and will sometimes even tell their parents what to do. And this is the age where they REALLY start to take it home, based on the reports I get "from the field". By about age 2 1/2, they start to show off, and then they can start to follow instructions, and make their hands jump like a frog, or "climb" up or down in pitch, or play quickly or slowly. You also start to see one finger and single note playing.
Around age 3-5, melodic exploration begins, where a child will play a few notes, and, if they've had enough musical exposure, may even comment that "That's Jingle Bells!" as they recognize fragments. The black keys are wonderful for this, because they give a pentatonic scale with no half-steps, and many of the common folk melodies children learn to sing, like Mary Had a Little Lamb require only those 5 notes. Children at this age also can start transferring rhythm patterns to piano in free exploration, and creating their own melodies. If the child is learning melodies in Kindermusik or other music classes, they will often begin playing these on piano, too. Finger independence is beginning, and the children are developing motor control and are able to start playing with different articulations and at different volume levels, so you can now say "Can you play quieter, please" and demonstrate it-and have it stick (for the next minute or two, anyway)
Between age 5-7, I start to see preferences developing. In Kindermusik, we introduce three instruments in this age group-glockenspiel, recorder, and dulcimer. Often a child will prefer one or more of these, and if piano is available, it becomes just another instrument for exploration. Some children LOVE piano-and those are the ones who will happily move to piano lessons as soon as they graduate Kindermusik. Others fall in love with recorder, or with dulcimer, and for them, the next logical step is a wind instrument, such as continued recorder instruction, or a string instrument.
But it all starts with letting the child explore. Enjoy the journey.
Ms. Donna
We explore many instruments in Kindermusik classes this week. We are now enrolling for fall, and please see the full schedule at http://music.memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php
And, if you've been bitten by the piano bug, the community music school offers classes and lessons for all ages, including parents who always wanted to take piano, but never had the chance, or who took piano and quit and now regret it :). http://music.memphis.edu/cms/
Taken from "Put a Piano in Your Exploration Box", a conference session at the 2011 Partnership of Kindermusik Educators Atlanta Regional Conference, by Donna DeVore Metler.
Here's a few basic steps for guiding your child's piano/keyboard exploration throughout the years. Most of all, remember-you're not giving a piano lesson. You're having fun. When your child is done, they'll crawl/walk away. Let them.
Start with a label:
When you're dealing with infants and young toddlers, as we do in class, it's not so much what they do as what you, as the parent do. Just as, in a Kindermusik class, we'll sing up high and move the baby up high, you can do the same thing on the piano, playing a few notes up high, and a few down low, and labeling them. The same is true with all those other musical opposites that we explore in class weekly. High/low, fast/slow. As your baby becomes a toddler, he'll probably come to the piano and explore too. And yes, that will be open hand, multi-note at a time banging. But it's exploring and it's musical. Label what's there, and give the child ideas for the future. Melodies will come later.
As toddlers get older, they get more independent. Around age 2, many of my students get shy in class and don't want to come to the piano in the classroom, but still love to watch their parents, and will sometimes even tell their parents what to do. And this is the age where they REALLY start to take it home, based on the reports I get "from the field". By about age 2 1/2, they start to show off, and then they can start to follow instructions, and make their hands jump like a frog, or "climb" up or down in pitch, or play quickly or slowly. You also start to see one finger and single note playing.
Around age 3-5, melodic exploration begins, where a child will play a few notes, and, if they've had enough musical exposure, may even comment that "That's Jingle Bells!" as they recognize fragments. The black keys are wonderful for this, because they give a pentatonic scale with no half-steps, and many of the common folk melodies children learn to sing, like Mary Had a Little Lamb require only those 5 notes. Children at this age also can start transferring rhythm patterns to piano in free exploration, and creating their own melodies. If the child is learning melodies in Kindermusik or other music classes, they will often begin playing these on piano, too. Finger independence is beginning, and the children are developing motor control and are able to start playing with different articulations and at different volume levels, so you can now say "Can you play quieter, please" and demonstrate it-and have it stick (for the next minute or two, anyway)
Between age 5-7, I start to see preferences developing. In Kindermusik, we introduce three instruments in this age group-glockenspiel, recorder, and dulcimer. Often a child will prefer one or more of these, and if piano is available, it becomes just another instrument for exploration. Some children LOVE piano-and those are the ones who will happily move to piano lessons as soon as they graduate Kindermusik. Others fall in love with recorder, or with dulcimer, and for them, the next logical step is a wind instrument, such as continued recorder instruction, or a string instrument.
But it all starts with letting the child explore. Enjoy the journey.
Ms. Donna
We explore many instruments in Kindermusik classes this week. We are now enrolling for fall, and please see the full schedule at http://music.memphis.edu/cms/childhood.php
And, if you've been bitten by the piano bug, the community music school offers classes and lessons for all ages, including parents who always wanted to take piano, but never had the chance, or who took piano and quit and now regret it :). http://music.memphis.edu/cms/
Taken from "Put a Piano in Your Exploration Box", a conference session at the 2011 Partnership of Kindermusik Educators Atlanta Regional Conference, by Donna DeVore Metler.
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