Music Together Rocket City

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!! Ms. Emily here. I am one thankful Director! I could not be more grateful for these incredible teachers!! They work so incredibly hard for our Music Together Rocket City family!! Bringing joy, smiles, laughter, dancing, love, kindness and of course music to so many families in our community. I don’t know what I would do without them. This week let’s really celebrate them and all teachers! Give them a hug, a high five, a special note of thanks, a smile or a song. 💃🏽. Teachers are my hero’s! ❤️ 🎶

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Children learn a great deal about their environment and the surrounding world during their early years. For example: Singing songs about specific animals or insects gives the children the opportunity to learn specific "content knowledge" about how the animal or insect moves or flies. By using the Family Songbook, they can even learn what it looks like, enabling the children to identify it in "the real world." Content knowledge such as this is an important part of cognitive development.

Take a moment today to go outside and listen to Mother Natures music all around us! Enjoy this beautiful day and happy Earth Day! "Every day is Earth Day"

When we meow like cats, vroom-vroom like cars, and whoosh like the wind, we are not only being playful and developmentally-appropriate, but we’re also warming up our voices, stimulating our imaginations, and orienting our ears to the key and scale of the song we’re singing. You hear your children playing with their voices all the time—it’s like they instinctively know what to do to stretch their voices and their creativity. Listen for the ways that they engage in vocal play and sound play while you’re at home, and let me know what you hear so we can steal their great ideas!

It’s so important to allow children to experience music and our classes in their own way. Children are born knowing how to teach themselves by playing—by observing activity around them, by exploring and manipulating objects, and by imitating what they see. Instead of trying to “teach” your child, simply sing and play your instruments and let them watch you while they teach themselves.

Have you ever wondered why we do a “play-along” instrument jam each week toward the end of class? For the first 35–40 minutes of class, the teachers lead you through songs and dances, guiding the class and orchestrating the lesson plan. Now, during the play-along, you and your child have a chance to experiment with different ways to play your instrument without being led by me. In our culture, most children don’t get a chance to observe their important adults making music and just “jamming” for fun. That’s what the play-along is all about. So I invite you to relax, let loose, and jam!

Music Together collections have a rich variety of tonalities and meters—songs in major and non-major tonalities as well mixed/asymmetric meters. Even if you don’t have any formal music training yourself, I bet you can appreciate that this gives you and your child a rich musical vocabulary and a chance to experience a variety of songs from all around the world.

Did you know that most music in Western Culture is in duple meter, made up of 2 or 4 beats grouped together? You’ll also hear music in triple meter, with 3-beat groupings—like Happy Birthday or a waltz. This week in class some of us danced to our song Tsakonikos with 3-beat and 2-beat groupings in a different way, which is much less common—particularly in children’s music. By including these kinds of "asymmetric" meters in our curriculum, we’re providing children with a rich variety that will help them to build a strong musical foundation. In fact, while we adults may find asymmetric meter songs/chants challenging, children with early exposure to these meters don’t.