You can teach music! But when?
Have you wanted your kids to have a music education for a while, but you haven’t found an easy way to access one yet?
Who will teach them?
If you never had the chance to take music classes yourself, you might feel like you shouldn’t try and teach your kids about music. That’s absolutely not true. There is no reason you need any sort of special talent, training, or experience to start teaching your kids music. In fact, if you don’t know a lot about music yet, it’s a wonderful opportunity to learn alongside your child. Kids often pick up on parents’ enthusiasm, and love a chance to know as much or more than mom or dad!
You are already giving your kids musical experiences. Likely on a daily basis. For example: Do you listen to music while driving in the car? Sing while you clean the house? Dance to music? I bet you can think of even more ways music is already part of your family’s day!
School or Community Programs
If community or school music programs are available in your area, take full advantage!
Unfortunately, often they aren’t available or aren’t accessible. Perhaps the program time or location makes it impossible to attend, or maybe it’s just not possible to pack everyone up and make sure you have the car.
Private Music Lessons
You may have noticed if you listened to the video on the last page, that the speaker specifically mentioned playing or making music as well as formal lessons either in school or privately. Unfortunately, not all areas have a good teacher available. There may be cost barriers or maybe you just don’t have a reliable way to get to the teacher. Formal lessons can be expensive in many areas and often require purchasing an instrument as well. Despite this, I highly recommend enrolling your kids in music lessons with a good teacher if that’s an option for your family.
But if it’s not possible, don’t dismay! While all of the options above are wonderful, I’ll continue on the assumption you don’t have access to any live programs or teachers at the moment.
Teach Your Kids Music at Home
Making music can be as simple as using our voice as an instrument to sing, or perhaps playing the very affordable recorder. You can make your own rhythm instruments at home. Use them to teach a steady beat, and then progress to learning more complex rhythms with them. You might have seen videos a while back from the ‘cup tapping’’ fad. Even just a plastic cup is enough to make music and learn.
There are endless options to give your kids the music education they need and deserve. No matter that something is preventing you from accessing a teacher. I’m a private teacher myself, and would love to help you teach your child. If you have any questions I’m always happy to hear from you!
Remember, the benefits of music education come from learning about music and making music, not from having talent or an expensive instrument. It is the process, the journey, and the joy we are after.
When?
Your day (and your children’s day!), is already very busy. Is there really enough time to add another activity in?
I’m sure you’ve guessed my answer by now! It doesn’t need to take a lot of time to insert a bit of music education into your day. We are not talking hour long classes every day. Although you certainly could if you do have the time…
Here are some ideas on where to find time for short ‘music classes’ at home:
- Transitions during your day. This works especially well for younger children. For example, you could sing a song together while you clean up from lunch. Or you might put on some classical music and move freely to it as a movement break from book-work. Transitions during the day are a good time to sneak in 5 minutes of music time. Doing this might even eliminate some of the struggle younger children can have moving between activities.
- Incorporate music into other subjects you may teach at home already and you won’t need any extra time. For example, you might talk about and listen to a historical composer while learning about history, or choose a musical science experiment to learn about science.
- Regular ‘classes’. Scheduling regular music class time in your week sounds time consuming, but can be done in as little as 15 minutes once or twice a week. You may find your children enjoying them so much you do them more often though!
- Remember, you can learn along with your kids too! And you don’t need much time to get started.
We’ve covered why your child needs a music education, and when to fit it in. Next up is what exactly to teach in these music classes. There’s a lot you can teach, and some options will work better for some ages of children and families than others. All my activities suggestions are aimed at elementary school ages (preschool through sixth grade).
