Learning Music for Kids

Welcome to another series of 12 Months of Montessori. For this month, I am going to feature our Montessori-inspired activities in learning music.
Different Types of Music

Mavi loves learning about music. We often hear different genre in stores like classical, rap, hip hop and ballads. He would often ask me “why are some people making sad music Mom?”.  Therefore, I decided to introduce Mavi to the different types of music.  How it is used to express one’s feelings, how it used to pray, to entertain and how it symbolizes one’s origins.  

I made cards for each music genre, with description and a picture of the famous artist in that category.

As we read each card, we listened to some samples in Youtube, and would ask his opinion about the music. He likes Michael Jackson by the way!


Musical Notes and Symbols
“When you read, you begin with ABC. When you sing you begin with DO RE MI. The first three notes that happened to be”, the famous lines of Froilan Maria in The Sound of Music (my all time favourite!)

Okay, so this was just a brief introduction to musical notes.   This would be best taught or demonstrated if you are playing a musical instrument, but since we’re not, I doubt if Mavi would really understand how these notes work. So just to give him an idea about the ABCs of music, I presented the different notes used in creating music.


Making Music with Rhythm Bells

We’ve been using these Vilac Musical Bells  for months now and the boys love it! And now, let me showcase these beautiful percussion instruments to you! Each bell corresponds to a note, so that’s 8 bells all in all with lower and upper DO.  What I like about these bells are their beautiful and attractive colors!  I assure you, they’re too attractive that your kids couldn’t resist playing them.  Though the bells come with its own musical chart, I used the ones from Imagine Our Life.

I printed/laminated the note cards and musical sheet for us to work on.  Note that some of the color codes  in the printed material doesn’t match with the colors of our bells. But it was fine, I focused more on showing Mavi the positioning of the notes in the staff and what does it mean.

As you can see, Mavi here is trying to check the difference of the tone/pitch of each bell as the note rises on the musical staff.

Now let’s combine these notes and create music! This musical sheet is from Imagine Our Life.

I love our Vilac Bells and if you are interested, here’s the link to the product.

Musical Instruments
Next, we talked about the different types of musical instruments. We used our Safari Toob Musical Instruments for this. The figures are just so beautiful! They're close to perfection and would look like replicas of the original instruments.

Again, I created these definition cards explaining how the instruments work. (Note that I let him read the definition for reading practice and vocabulary)


You can get the music types and musical instruments description cards here.

We followed this with a sorting activity.  I printed out this Musical Instruments 3 part card file from The Helpful Garden and used it as sorting cards instead.  Learn more about this activity from here or click the image below.

This is the first time we ever had a music lesson at home.  Music has a world of its own, like sports and dancing.  I believe that this just doesn’t end here. If you really want to dig dipper in this field, you have to be a part of, like learning how to play a musical instrument, voice lessons or be in a musical play or orchestra. That’s why this summer, I enrol Mavi in a Star Camp as he really loves to dance and sing.  He is already looking forward to it!

And that ends our music lesson at home.  This post is part of the 12 Months of Montessori Learning which is hosted by Natural Beach Living and The Natural Homeschool.

Amazing blogs involved in the 12 Months of Montessori Learning

Natural Beach Living ~ The Natural Homeschool ~ Living Montessori Now ~ Planting Peas

The Kavanaugh Report ~ Mama’s Happy Hive ~ Study at Home Mama ~ Child Led Life

Every Star Is Different ~ Grace and Green Pastures ~ The Pinay Homeschooler