Meadow Star Music

Child-Centered Music Instruction
Small Group General Music Classes for K-5 Homeschoolers and Unschoolers

Meadow Star Music general music classes are designed for small cohorts of homeschooling families (three to ten children) for the duration of the school year. Classes are 30 minutes long once per week for 35 weeks. There is no financial obligation to continue from September until May, but the hope is to stay together in a small group of similar-aged peers for the sake of consistency and for building community & trust. Emphasis will be placed on vocal development, audiation and aural skills, ensemble skills, instrumental technique, safe risk-taking, and expressive music-making.

A child's first and life-long instrument is their voice. Children will learn to find their singing voices and be comfortable singing in a group or alone. They will play pitched and unpitched percussion instruments, such as xylophones, glockenspiels, hand drums, wood blocks, guiros, maracas, triangles, finger cymbals, and many more! Creative movement is an essential component of learning expressive music-making, and children will engage in a variety of fine motor, gross motor, stationary, and locomotor movements and dances to make connections to their musical understanding.

Children will create their own music through improvisation and composition. Young children can improvise pitches on a xylophone to the rhythm of the words of a poem, or they can create their own rhythm word chains using body percussion or unpitched percussion. As children progress, they can more purposefully compose rhythmic and melodic patterns using symbols and notation.

Learning music by rote is important and appropriate in elementary music: It improves children's listening/aural skills and helps them better recognize and analyze patterns in music. But, children will also learn basic music literacy skills. They will learn to read and write (notate) music, beginning with iconic notation (pictures and stick notation) and gradually moving toward traditional Western notation on a staff. Children will reflect on and evaluate their own musical performances and those of others.

Children will make connections between different musical selections, between music and other arts, and between music and other subjects. They will recognize the cultural and historical relevance of musical selections.

The National Core Arts Standards for Music (Perform, Create, Respond, Connect) are the how of elementary music making. For the what, visit the Class Descriptions page. For the why, visit the Philosophy page.