Big Kids Classes In Depth
Thanks for your interest in Music Together Big Kids!
Reserve your space in the demo class on December 20!
We are excited to offer the new Music Together Big Kids program for children ages 5, 6, and 7 this Fall! After several of years of building and improving Big Kids at multiple pilot locations, Music Together, LLC made the program available to qualifying centers for the first time in the Fall of 2011.
Big Kids Fall classes are
- 60 minutes long
- 3:30 PM on Thursdays
- starting January 5
- located at Sun Soo Tae Kwon Do in West Asheville
- Tuition of $160 covers 10 weeks of classes and all materials. In addition to a special songbook just for big kids and 2 identical CD's, families will receive new Home Play pages to carry the classroom fun/learning into the home.
- eligible for the $60 discount if a younger sibling is enrolled in a Mixed Ages class
Parent attendance in classes is lovely, but it's only required at the first and last class and one more in between. In order to maintain a special learning environment for our special big kids, we can't have younger siblings in this class unless they are younger than 8 months.
Whereas Mixed Ages classes are designed to help your child develop the fundamental music skills of singing accurately and in tune and move accurately to a beat, the Big Kids classes will support pre-music-reading skills, noticing and naming musical concepts, tonal and rhythmic solfege, and contextual creativity (individual and group) all while continuing to provide a playful, musically rich class environment. Expect lots of singing, chanting, game songs, rhythm and tonal patterns, a wide variety of movement and plenty of it, instrument play and hand-drumming. There will be no formal instrument instruction.
Big Kids classes will use music from the Song Collections that we use in Mixed Ages classes. If your child has already learned the Bells Song Collection in a previous Mixed Ages class, then he or she will be primed to take musical understanding to the next level with those familiar songs this Winter. If you're unsure about a program where your child will already know the music, keep on reading below. I think you'll be pleased.
If your child has never taken a Music Together class before, or if you missed Bells last time around, don't worry. Big Kids classes are accommodating and appropriate for kids who've never had a music class in their lives. And there's no better way to start your child's musical education than in a relaxed group environment.
Reserve your space in the demo class on December 20!
**Using the Same Songs**
At our house, we love puzzles. When my son was a baby, he enjoyed the big wooden puzzles with animal shapes and handy little knobs. As he mastered those and grew and learned, he moved on to the standard cardboard version, but with just a few pieces. Now at 6 years of age, he enjoys putting together large puzzles with odd-shaped pieces.
But just the other day, when I fished out the old "baby" puzzles for our 1-year-old, my big boy actually plunked down in the floor and worked through every single one of them with great enthusiasm!
When your child puts a puzzle together once, what do you do with it then? Do you toss it and buy a new puzzle? I would guess that most of us hang on to puzzles for a while so our children can enjoy working them again and again. Until I sat to write this out, I never thought consciously past, "Well, he'll enjoy working this puzzle again!" But, if we go beyond that, we realize that there's actually a lot of valuable stuff going on when our kids re-work puzzles. As kids' brains and bodies change, they learn to evaluate each piece before just trying to cram it someplace. They learn to match not only colors but shapes and context. They learn the satisfaction of a completed task, appreciation of aesthetics (unless it's a spongebob puzzle!), how to expand the process as it's relevant to other puzzles, and much more.
Learning to decode the *music of our culture* is much like learning to put together puzzles. Each song is a puzzle, with its unique combination of tones and timbres (colors), melodic contours, harmonic structure (shapes), aesthetic appeal, societal context, etc. Furthermore, songs exceed the scope of puzzles: Music is a language that gains meaning and is a catalyst for creating emotional bonds. Music doesn't have to come in a box; it can be created and shared with nothing more than voices and bodies.
Like a puzzle, we don't *toss* a song once we can sing it accurately. We can learn so much more from a song through repeated listening, expression, and noticing and manipulating different aspects of the music. And it's important to remember the value of the sheer joy of singing a song we already know!
