Complimentary product received from Teach Your Child Piano!
If you are followers on our Little Learner and Mom IG you know my son, well our entire family loves music. My son was exposed to music early on in the womb because his dad is a music producer and insisted on playing music to my belly every night. So when my son was born he instantly took to all things music.
My son’s first instrument was the trombone it was like love at first sight from 18 months old until the present. We bought his first trombone when he was 3 and he has been playing every since. When Karen asked me if we would be interested in taking a look at the Teach Your Child Piano course Read Music Notes in Six Weeks and the Music Camp: Summer Siesta course, we were happy to review them.
The Teach Your Child Piano courses are on the “Teachable” platform. You will have your own dashboard that includes your course of study. Some of the activities include downloadable pdfs and embedded videos. Not all of the Siesta Summer activities have videos. I think it would be nice if each included one example of the topic. This would be helpful for those students and parents who have no background in music. The platform is easily managed and it tracks your progress as long as you click the continue and complete button.
Read Music Notes in Six Weeks
Read Music Notes in Six Weeks is a great course for beginners who do not have a background in music. My son has a background in music so after looking over the first week, he felt like it was just a little too easy for him. But I am going to base my review on what I think if I had a non-musical child. This is a great course to introduce your students to reading music and music theory. The included a detailed lesson plan, games, worksheets, instructional video, flashcards, and a practice plan.
There are 6 modules that cover:
- Learning Your Way Around The Keyboard
- Treble Clef Line Notes
- Treble Clef Space Notes
- Bass Clef Line Notes
- Bass Clef Space Notes
- Review and Preparing for the Grand Recital
After looking through all the weeks I think this would be great for a family who has no or very little background in music. I do still have plans to have my son review the weeks just as a review in the fall.
Music Camp Online: Summer Siesta
Summer Siesta consists of 120 self-paced lessons for ages 4-14. The course runs from May to August, but I think this can be used year-round and I hope Karen will consider keeping the program going year-round. There is so much to unpack in this course and for a music-loving family like ours, we need more time to really appreciate all the wonderfulness in this course. Summer Siesta is really a music appreciation course that families can pair well with geography, history, and cultural lessons in their homeschool.
Students can study:
- Musical Era (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern)
- Various Music Genre
- Orchestra and Foreign Instruments
- Cultural Music
- Composers
- Chorus
- Vocal Expression
- DIY Instruments
There are 120 lessons the summer program encourages students to do 1 activity per day for a total of 60 activities over the summer. You don’t have to do the activities in order, but students will earn a certificate at the end of the course if the activities are completed. For us, that wasn’t going to be something achievable because we kept going down rabbit trails. The activity sheets can be done orally or written. We do them orally and I recorded the answers down for my son because I wanted him to enjoy researching and having fun.
For copyright reasons and to protect the creator’s work I won’t be uploading a copy of the full sheet, but I can tell you that the sheets are detailed and not overwhelming.
My son decided he wanted to spend time learning more about Spanish composer the “Queen of Percussion” Shelia “E” Escovedo! Let me just tell you this was a family affair when my husband got wind that we were doing this study he told us about the Sheila E Master Class. We were all captivated by her wonderful story and percussion lessons. My son was super intrigued and took things to another level and decided to research Pete Escovedo who is her father. We ended up doing 2 lessons on Spanish composers. We also did an instrument study on the bongos. We continued to go down another rabbit hole that led us to Prince. Like really we studied all about PRINCE !!!!
Of course, after we did Shelia E he wanted to research the trombone. So we grabbed the brass instrument and jazz activity sheet and learned about the Trombone and Trombone Shorty. That lesson didn’t stop there because it lead us down the road to New Orleans’ infamous Treme history.
We really like the Summer Siesta and like I said I hope my review persuades the creator to extend the course for year-round availability. Read Music Notes in Six Weeks and Music Camp: Summer Siesta would be a great addition to your homeschool lessons if you are looking for a self-directed course. Self-directed courses work best for us because it allows us the freedom to follow our interest.
Teach Your Child Piano currently has 18 courses available prices start at $49 and up. There is a free course available and a monthly homeschool course. I defiantly recommend checking out Teach Your Child Piano.
Until the Next Time,
Mom and J
Little Learner and Mom 