Additional Resources for teaching your child music

Early Learning Teaching Your Child Music
1

Hi everyone I was wondering, what additional resources are you using for Music with your child?

There were a lot of discussion about SM and PW, I am looking to discuss other resources any of you EL parents found interesting or useful.

I have 3 kids 5 ( just turned a few weeks ago) yo, 3 yo and 1 yo, and we had great success with Little Musician.

Additional resources we’ve used:

Themes to Remember – perfect addition to LMs, as it covers about 200 classical compositions and makes it easy to remember them. We used to listen to these in the car and kids effortlessly memorized dozen of classical melodies.

Tuneables (http://www.thetuneables.com) – kids loved this. The cartoon is very well made and offers a lot, but it feels like it is just a beginning of the series, you would imagine there will be more materials. They are talking about “music curriculum” on their site. If you think of Music Curriculum, like LMs, you will be disappointed, – there is nothing like that. Just one adorable cartoon and some materials to supplement it, that you can buy. We have the cartoon “I love Music” and found it to be a fun and nice supplement, but definitely not a “curriculum”

Suzie’s Piano Primer (http://www.amazon.com/Suzies-Piano-Primer-Lessons-Kids/dp/B002UXRE6I) – I would write the same as about Tuneables – Great video, very nice supplement, but of course not enough on its own. It fits right in our collection of music education cartoons.

[b]Hoffman Academy /b – 60 free piano lessons for children, very very nicely done and quite engaging. I would say if you have no access to piano school or piano tutor – this is an excellent resource! It was engaging for my 5 and 3 yo. Lessons are very short and you can go through them as fast or as slow as you like. You also can get additional printable resources and mp3s for each lesson for whooping $1 a lesson :yes: . But you can do without them as well. My 3 yo told me, – “I like how the teacher talks to me on this video”. We usually pose and follow each direction and it is lovely! And… I heard they will adding guitar lessons next.

So, what additional music resources you are using?

2

We love all the Beethoven’s Wig CDs - there are five different CDs now. They have classical pieces with funny lyrics and then repeated without the singing. Those are my all time favourite kids music CDs.

Joytunes makes apps to teach piano and recorder. We haven’t used them yet but they do look very good http://www.joytunes.com/

And there is the Trebellina DVD which my 2 year old absolutely loves http://www.trebellina.com/

I’d love to hear from others. I would love something else alongside Little Musician (which we have and love) to continue teaching singing / perfect pitch

3

We love Hoffman academy too! It really is well done. :yes:

There are a lot of resources on http://www.musick8.com that I would love to delve into.

Boomwhackers have been a lot of fun, and the colors mostly match LMs, so you can play them with the karaoke section.

Here’s a little shout-out for my own printables: http://www.professional-mothering.com/p/store.html

I especially love Anne’s barnyard friends videos. My kids use her stories as reference when we do flashcards. http://pianoanne.blogspot.com/

Don’t discount the benefits of a local children’s choir if you have the budget and the teachers are well trained. I think being part of a group has helped my son Peter more than anything else I’ve done. Helen and Patrick have learned more at home. I guess it depends on the kid. There’s also a lot of children’s song books with fun activities in them, percussion instruments, and just playing with silks while listening to music. Building a rich music vocabulary with songs unique to your family culture/region/religion (if applicable) is one of the best things you can do for kids. My children’s favorite songs are mostly the ones the learn at church, so I’ve jumped with it and made them part of their piano lessons. I know the last comments are kind of simple answers, but everything seems to go smoother for us when we do the basics.

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Lzp11,

Yes, of course, Trebellina :yes: it was our first Music-related DVD, and all my kids loved it! We watched it till it was too worn to use! :frowning:

We tried Beeethoven’s Wig, but it was not as good as Themes to Remember. What I liked in Themes to Remember is that every piece’s lyrics contain the name of the composer and something about the musical composition. In Beethoven’s wig ( may be because we tried it after we got used to Themes to Remember style) we felt there was not enough information right there in actual lyrics. Also we do not have all of their CDs, so may be they are different in later editions. Are they?

Tamsyn, thank you for those resources, I did not realized that PianoAnn had a blog!

We like her youtube videos, so I better write the link here for the reference - The Piano Discoveries Theory Tutorials by Pianoanne: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE9BB54C67532B521

I never used MusicK8 site, you mentioned but I really like their youtube channel, and that reminded me of

Plank Road Publishing Music Concept Videos by MusicK8 – they are great! :yes: I wish they had more. You can find the whole collection here on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE68771AF73EE2886

And, Tamsyn, your blog is where I got the best explanation on the Fixed and Movable “Do” ( among many others things!), thank you :yes:

And another thing that I forgot to mention – the Golden Records!

They have some beautiful titles in these series:

A Child’s Introduction to the Orchestra
A Child’s Introduction to the Nutcracker Suite with Bob Keeshan
A Child’s Introduction to Mozart and Beethoven narrated by Robert Helpmann

The Riverside Wonderland also has:
A Child’s Introduction to the Instruments of the Orchestra with Joseph Cooper

These were all produced as vinyl records in 50th and 60th, and they are real nice, we listen to them in the car as we drive. You can find all of them here for free: http://www.artsreformation.com/records/ I highly recommend them!

Classics for kids also a good website with lots of resources on classical music and composers – http://www.classicsforkids.com/

5

I just realized the Your Baby/Child Can Discover videos weren’t on here. They serve as an excellent introduction to music, and a slew of other things as well. I absolutely love the series.
http://yourbabycanread.com/index.php/products/math-music-logic/your-child-can-discover.html

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Здравствуйте! Спасибо большое за ценную информацию-я как раз искала дополнительные ресурсы по музыке доя обучения детей. Будем пробовать!

7

Have a look at the Music for Little Mozarts Curriculum.

It’s what I teach in my studio, and I’ve had fantastic success with it! If your child has already learned the fixed do system, this curriculum would be a wonderful progression.

I haven’t had a lot of experience with little musician, but does it teach them piano keys etc?

There should be a link to some more info on Music for Little Mozarts here: http://www.morganknowlesmusic.com/#!music-for-little-mozarts/c1ddc

It’s also available on the alfred’s website, try googling music for little mozarts?

Let me know what you think of this curriculum, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Especially from anyone with experience with the encore curriculum? I’m not sure which is better…

8

Wellcome to the Forum, Morganmusic!

In responce to your question about Little Musician.

Yes, Little Musician teaches piano keys, among everything else :yes:

My girl never had any instruction, apart from Little Musician and she can easily read all the notes on stuff (treble and base), find corresponding key on the piano and sing it in solfege. All from following Little Musician Curriculum.

Do take into account, Little Musician is not a program for teaching a child piano. It is a Music Literacy and Appreciation Program, with focus on developing ( or preserving, as in young children) perfect pitch.

It covers cord recognition training (similar to the Eguchi method used in Japan, which some consider to be the best way to foster ‘perfect pitch’ and which apparently has produced a very high success rate); note sounds ( association of pitch with the written note on the musical staff); solfege; exercises for training the ear and sight reading music; rhythm and beats; scales; basic keyboard lessons and music knowledge and appreciation (musical instruments, famous compositions and famous classical composers).

Little Musician is the program that can be done before starting to study any musical instrument, which is why it was a great fit for my kids, as I want them to chose for themselves which musical instrument they would like to play, after learning to love, understand and appreciate music.