Music Education in the Home: No-Prep Music Study

Let's talk about music study! As a former music teacher, you'd think I would be a pro at this, and yet it's something that we rarely did formally until fairly recently, when I figured out a really easy way to make this work for us, and I think you could make it work as well!

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FIRST: If you haven't already, listen to Peter and the Wolf, Carnival of the Animals, and A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. You can find free library & online resources, and they're a wonderful introduction to different instruments, and so engaging! This CD/mp3 is my all-time favorite version, Bernstein is such a classic!

NEXT: Get a kid-friendly book of composer biographies (I have an old edition of this Encyclopedia of Music but it goes into some unnecessary detail about composers' love lives, so I skip those when I read aloud but you might like to censor more than I do!)

THEN: Use Line Rider videos on YouTube to find pieces for study—we'll read about Mozart, discuss his biography (for bonus points, get extra composer picture books from the library but we are LOW KEY here), then listen to *one* corresponding Line Rider video (I have a playlist right here) *without saying anything*—ask kids to tell about tempo & instruments, see if they can hum or sing the theme(s), and add in anything they may have missed.

LAST: Gather them around and get ready for giggles when they watch the video!

The kids look forward to this so very much that we're being much more consistent with music study because it requires ZERO prep work on my part. You can do it, I promise!

Looking for more ways to incorporate music in your home life? Here's a series I started years ago!