How To Have Fun This Summer!

Announcing: A Special Drop-In Class this Summer!

Please join us on Monday Mornings at 10:00 am Starting July 5th for special classes at my home studio for the summer: 5950 SE Kelly St, Portland! To sign up call 503-708-2827 today!

Bringing children of all ages together provides a dynamic and integrated learning experience for everyone. So we took favorite Kindermusik songs and activities like “Shake, Shake the Apple Tree” and “hammocking” and rolled them into a fun, family class where each child is welcomed and valued and family “together time” is celebrated and cherished.

Family Time Curriculum Description

Age Range: newborn through 7 years

Class Structure: 8 classes in a semester for the summer
Class Length: 45 minutes each week
Class Size: 6-7 families with at least one caregiver per family
Cost: Drop-in fee $5.00 per class or $40 for semester
Home Materials: including a Family Activity Guide, Hand and Finger Puppet, Two CDs of music from class, two instruments, and two literature books cost: $60.00

What Families Experience in Class:

• Singing -- From the first “Hello” song to the last “Goodbye,” exploring a variety of musical styles and genres leads children to find their own voice. Plus singing helps with memory and recall, physical development, creativity, and socialization.
• Assorted Movement -- Whether moving as a family, as a class, or as individuals, Family Time movement activities enhance coordination skills, create opportunities for imitation and exploration, and give everyone something to smile, rock, bounce, or dance about.
• Story Time -- Reading aloud to children stimulates their curiosity, expands their knowledge, and broadens their understanding of language.
• Family Jam -- Children as well as adults will love selecting a unique instrument and joining in one big class jam instrument play along session each week.
• Musical Concepts -- Fun engaging activities bring out the musicality in everyone, from the youngest member of the family to the oldest. Families learn more about music as they learn more about each other.
• Expert advice -- A Kindermusik educator explains how the musically based activities enhance each child’s complete development.

• Learning continues at home -- With the home materials, the learning and bonding continues at home with the child’s best teacher—the parent!

In Make Way for Music, families will sing, dance, and move their way through an exploration of several elements of music: beat and rhythm, concepts and contrasts (such as staccato and legato, high and low, the major scale, and arpeggios), the human voice, instrument families, and ensemble. They’ll engage in developmentally appropriate activities that the whole family can enjoy together, including fingerplays, songs, circle dances, story time, and family jam.

Sign Up Today!
Call 503-708-2827
Free set of egg shakers to all
who sign up for the semester!

Instrument Families

Remember When Pluto Was A Planet--And Then It Wasn't?
(Notes from Sing, Play and Grow: A Family Guide to Musical Fun)

We humans like to fit neatly in categories, and when the boundaries are blurred we get a little nervous.  Categories help us describe and analyze things.  Musicians use all sorts of categories: rhythms (think: tangos, salsas, and rumbas), styles (choose your radio station--pop, hip-hop, or classical), and types of instruments (woodwinds, percussion, brass and strings).  Just like planets, these categories can get a bit murky (so if a flute is make of metal, why is it a woodwind?).

During Family Time Class your child will begin to learn how instruments are organized.  Some instruments we tap and some we blow.  Some have strings, some have reeds, some are made of brass.  Putting things into categories is something preschoolers love to do.  Learning about colors, shapes, and sizes brings some order to the chaos of early childhood.  Discovering musical categories adds another dimension to recognizing similarities and differences.

"All night have the roses heard

The flute, violin, bassoon;

All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd

To the dances dancing in tune."
Alfred Lord Tennyson

SEE HOW THEY GROW

Your Infant and Instrument Families
Not even the greatest musical prodigy can distinguish between strings and woodwinds in infancy, but sorting things into categories is something adults do all the time.  (Think: winter clothes/summer clothes; junk food/healthy food; good boss/bad boss.)  As with everything else, sorting starts in infancy.  The first set of categories is broad and basic, probably something like "Am I comfortable or miserable?" which gets refined into "Am I sleepy or wakeful?" and "Am I hungry or full?"  Soon your child is exploring the world by looking around and bringing anything within reach to his mouth.  This leads to discoveries of contrasting shapes, textures, and sounds.  So before your child can recite all of the brass instruments (don't forget the flugelhorn), he'll need to develop more basic concepts such as "warm/cold."

Your Toddler and Instrument Families

Now that your child is up and about, she is able to examine and analyze everything within her reach.  As part of her play she's discovering how some things are the same and others different, and she is mentally developing categories--wet/dry, big/little, soft/hard.  She may be thinking, "Not all stuffed animals look alike, but they have a lot in common, and they don't look at all like blocks."  In the same way, she's registering that the sounds she hears when she bangs pot lids together are different from those she hears when she squeezes her favorite squeaky toy.  Because children don't have the words to assign names to categories, it's hard for us as parents to see this development taking place, but under our very noses our children are developing concepts.  This ability to translate some concrete thing to an abstract idea is powerful stuff.  When our children start talking, we get a peek at how they're organizing their world.  At first the word "doggy" may refer to all animals.  Then "doggy" may mean "dogs and cats," and finally "doggy" may mean "all dogs except Pekingese."  Your child still isn't naming brass instruments yet, but she knows that clicking rhythm sticks and tooting through a tube are two different ways to make music.

Your Preschool and Instrument Families

If you check in with a preschool teacher (or even pay attention to what you find yourself teaching your child during daily activities at home) you'll see that forming categories is at the heart of the preschool curriculum.  At this age children are learning colors, shapes, and sizes; they're learning times of day and seasons of the year.  Preschoolers are good at this kind of simple categorization--it's what they like to do.  Identifying the sections of the orchestra is too complex, but your preschooler can happily distinguish between making music by blowing, making music by strumming, and making music by tapping.  Understanding these basic divisions will help a child grasp more sophisticated distinctions when he's older.

What are your family's favorite instrument families?  Leave a comment or tweet @Angelmusik

Music Concepts and Contrasts

What are Music Concepts?


They're like different flavors for music, adding distinction and particularity to the song or dance. Volunte could be a sirl of chocolate, making the beat more or less intense depending on how much you use. Use a dab of lemon to change the pitch--how high or low do you want to go? Then sprinkle the rhythm with chopped nuts if you want something a little bouncy or leave the nuts off if you prefer your music smooth. so many choices. So many dimensions. So many possible combinations.

Choose a musical cupcake that is right for the occasion. The bounce-along beat of Belfast Hornpipe is perfect for a car ride, while the softer lilt of Home Sweet Hom makes a lovely bedtime son.g The good news is that you have an endless variety to choose from, all are delicious, and none is fattening.

"Our life is composed, like the harmony of the worl, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say?" Michel de Montaigne


SEE HOW THEY GROW

Your Infant and Concepts and Contrasts

As parents of newborns, we're constantly monitoring our infant's environment and mood. Is the room too hot or too cold? Are the lights too bring or too dim? Is the baby hungry or did I give her too much food, too fast? At the same time, your child is learning to control her environment by closing her eyes, going to sleep, or letting you know when she's uncomfortable. This "too much or too little" aspect of infancy is a study in contrasts that has its musical counterpart in concepts like smooth-bumpy, high-low, and loud-quiet. Newborns, for the most part, avoid extremes and like things mellow. But within a few months your child will enjoy dangling high over your head then swooping down low, and will laugh delightedly when you bounce her on your lap. During Family Time you can help your baby discover thise contrasting concepts, but feel free to take her to a quiet corner of the room if the toddler's rhythm instruments get too noisy. It's alla bout discovering the difference (and balance) between loud and quiet.

Your Toddler and Concepts and Contrasts

Toddlers use their emerging body mastery to learn about rhythm--and about such basic musical concepts as "high and low," "loud (forte) and quiet (piano)," and "bumpy (staccato) and smooth (legato)." And now that their sensory systems have settled in, most (but not all) children this age will want to be challenged more than they did as infants. Toddlers learn musical concept kinesthetically--that is, they learn them by feeling them in their bodies. When you and your child move to Doot Doot Deedle-eet, first smoothly and them bumpily, your child uses his whole body to sense the difference. He may not be able to say "smooth" and "bumpy" (that's why we say it for him, over and over), but his body know just what to do.

Your Preschooler and Concepts and Contrasts

By the time he is three or four, your child will have enough control over his body and voice, as well as enough awareness about musical concepts, to use these concepts to create a specific effect. He'll be able to be "quiet like a mouse" and "loud like a lion." He'll also be learning to coordinate what he does with his body with what he does with his voice. If he pretends to be a turtle, he'll both move and speak slowly--and he'll delight in the sudden shift to being a bumblebee, buzzing and zipping around. In fact, your preschooler may know enough about these concepts and contrasts and how they relate to the real world, that he'll find it funny if you ask him to be "quiet like a lion."



Leave a comment or tweet @Angelmusik

Patterns for Learning Success

Patterns are everywhere! Does your child notice them? Patterns are in words like button. consonant, vowel, double consonants, vowel, consonant. Patterns are in numbers. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc., Patterns are in nature, like the colors on a butterfly, the rings of trees, the flight paths of birds. So many patterns everywhere. Each week at Kindermusik we are working on patterns and helping your child be aware of them. Here are some ways we've worked on patterns this semester:

Village (ages 0 -18 months): Babies have been moving to high and low sounds as they come repeatedly in songs like: Irish Trot. We go around, go up, go around, go down, and go around again! Not only are we experiencing patterns, but also high and low sounds. The more experience with high and low, the better your child will understand this important language and musical concept later on.
 







Our Time (ages 18mo-3yrs): One of our class's favorite songs is: "Toe-Tapp'n Blues" which leads to egg-shak'n blues, swing'n blues, and much more! Our Time has really enjoyed exploring all the movements while listening to the pattern of the melody and chords in the song. This song is in the blues style and has its chord pattern:

Family Time (all ages): We clap and recite "Doctor Knickerbocker."  Feeling these patterns will help us move in space and in time and help children recognize when patterns change.

Patterns are so much fun, especially combined with Kindermusik. As you can see each age group follows a logical progression from experience to cognition, recognition, and production of their own patterns. That's the benefit and the value of Kindermusik, we grow with your child to give them the next step in the learning process!

Our Voices

Our voices do so much for us every day, communicating information or emotion, sounds of surprise or delight, and more. Sometimes considered "the first instrument," the human voice has amazing possibility and range in both speech and singing, as well as vocal sound effects. Children first participate in musical experiences by responding to them with sounds from their voices. As they grow, they begin to control those sounds, matching pitch and singing along, or singing on their own, without accompaniment.

In Family Time class we sing up high and down low, and make music together in vocal ensembles. The whole family gets to sing and play together, allowing them to experience firsthand that every child (and adult) is musical by nature.

Follow the Leader

An old-fashioned game of "Follow the Leader" is the perfect way to feel musical concepts in your whole body, and it can be played with any number of followers. Have everyone line up. Then put on a CD and let the first person in line move to the music and lead the parade, with everyone else following her leaps, high steps, and arm flaps. After a few minutes the leader goes to the end of the line and the next person takes charge.

Stop! Look! Listen!

High-low, fast-slow,and smooth-bumpy are all around you. Feel the nubly carpet, then the cool, smooth bathtub. Watch a caterpillar inch its way across the sidewalk, then see a butterfly flit from flower to flower. Study the clouds. How would you describe them? If you were going to sing like a cloud, how would it sound? Would a dark thundercloud sound different from a trailing, misty morning fog? When you visit the zoo, don't just look, listen--and then talk about the lion's roar and the monkey's chatter.

John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmitt

Immigrant's names and languages have always been the subject of American jokes and songs, some affectionately well-intentioned and other mean-spirited. John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmitt seems to come out of that tradition. German immigrants began settling in America during colonial times, but the mid-nineteenth century saw a new influx of Germans and other northern Europeans arriving in the United States. Just when, where, and how John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmitt appeared is anybody's guess, but it has the same "endless loop" pattern as another song based on the Scandinavian immigrant experience. To get the full effect of this song, pronounce "j" as "y" and "w" as "v" ("My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin, etc.)

My name is John Johnson, I come from Wisconsin,
I work in the lumber yard there.
When I walk down the street all the people I meet,
They say, "What's your name?"
And I say-
My name is John Johnson, I come from Wisconsin...

Somehow a song that just keeps going and going always tickles a four-year-old's funny bone. Think of the ubiquitous "This is a Song that Never Ends," a more recent entrant in this tradition of songs that are good for long hikes, car rides, and testing the limits of parental patience.

Your Infant and Concepts and Contrasts

As parents of newborns, we're constantly monitoring our infant's environment and mood. Is the room too hot or too cold? Are the lights too bring or too dim? Is the baby hungry or did I giver her too much food, too fast? At the same time, your child is learning to control her environment by closing her eyes, going to sleep or letting you know when she's uncomfortable. This "too much or too little" aspect of infancy is a study in contrasts that has its musical counterpart in concepts like smooth-bumpy, high-low, and loud-quiet. Newborns, for the most part avoid extremes and like things mellow. But within a few months your child will enjoy dangling high over your head and then swooping down low, and will laugh delightedly when you bounce her on your lap. During Family Time you can help your baby discover these contrasting concepts, but feel free to take her to a quiet corner of the room if the toddler's rhythm instruments get too noisey. It's all about discovering the difference (and balance) between loud and quiet.

Blue Danube Waltz

Today waltzes may conjure up images of elegance: ball gowns, tiaras, and lovely gliding step, but two hundred years ago the waltz was considered shockingly risque'. Here was advance where you touched your partner's body and were swept into a dizzying whirl around the ballroom floor. Simply scandalous! When the waltz was danced at a ball in London, the Times reported:

"We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced...at the English         court on Friday last...it is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressor on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest       reserve which as hitherto been considered distinctive of English Females."

Despite such scandal, during the nineteenth century this Austrian peasant dance conquered the ballrooms of Europe. Vienna was the home of the waltz, and two Austrian composers, Johann Strauss I and II, were the nineteenth-century equivalent of Cole Porter, Elvis, and the Beatles rolled into one. This father and son duo was at the top of the charts for nearly 75 years.

Strauss the younger wrote On the Beautiful Blue Danube in 1867, just weeks after the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph suffered a terrible defeat by Prussia at the battle of Sadowa. It was a dark time for Austria, but Strauss's new waltz glittered. First performed as a choral work by the Vienna Men's Choral Association, the orchestral version quickly became Strauss's biggest hit, cementing the composer's reputation as Vienna's Waltz king.

Family Time Class

Family Time Class was so much fun yesterday! My favorite part was watching all the families waltz!

Beat and Rhythm

Babies get their first introduction to rhythm before they're even born, when they sense the comfort of their mother's heartbeat in the womb. Rhythm adds richness and meaning throughout our lives. We have rhythms of time--seasons of the year, night and day, work and play.  We also have rhythms of sound, not only in the organized beats of music, but also in a dog's bark, the steady beat of the washing machine's rumble, and in everyday spoken language.  Rhythm is like ritual.  It provides predictability and comfort, letting us know that things are as they should be.

During Family Time Class we become more aware of beats and rhythms, and, even better, have fun creating them together.  We use our voices, bodies and instruments to keep the beat.  Join in the march, waltz, or jig and discover that not only rhythm fun, it creates attitude.

Timbre

In Kindermusik class we explore a variety of musical instruments with different timbres (pronounced tambers) or characteristic sound qualities, such as the scratching of egg shakers, the ringing of bells and the resonant boom of the drum. As Baby or Toddler hears this variety of sounds, she is developing the listening vocabulary necessary for sound discrimination preceding language. And if she play the instruments, she learns that she can create a nice-sounding result.

503-708-2827
web site: www.kindermusikwithangie.kindermusik.net
Become a fan of my Facebook page!

Stop and Go

Music is sound and movement, and it is silence and stillness. Just as we experience sculpture in terms of where it begins and ends in space, we experience music in terms of where it begins and ends in time that surrounds it.

Kindermusik Teacher
503-708-2827
web site: http://www.kindermusikwithangie.kindermusik.net/
Become a fan of my Facebook page!

Free Kindermusik Asian New Year Party

Come Celebrate The Year Of The Tiger With Kindermusik!

We'll be Singing, Dancing, Marching in a Dragon Parade, Playing games, Noise Making, Face Painting, and Eating New Year's Treats

Saturday, February 13th
10:00 - 11:00 am
at
The New Day Center for the Arts
5516 SE Foster Rd, Portland

RSVP: 503-708-2827 / jansonfamily@spiritone.com
Yes, please bring a friend!

If you are unable to attend call to set up a
Free preview class!

Presented by Kindermusik with Angie
kindermusikwithangie.kindermusik.net; kindermusikwithangie.blogspot.com

Announcing Free Preview Classes!

Come try Kindermusik for Free




Mondays "Our Time" 1/18, 1/25
Fridays "Our Time" 1/22, 1/29
Saturdays "Family Time" 1/23, 1/30
all at 9:30 - 10:00 am

Wednesdays 1/20, 1/27
"Village" 9:30 – 10:00 and
"Sign and Sing"  10:30-11:00

RSVP: 503-708-2827/jansonfamily@spiritone.com

At the New Day Center for the Arts
5516 SE Foster Rd, Portland OR
All attending will receive a complimentary CD of children's music

Presented By: Kindermusik With Angie

http://www.kindermusikwithangie.kindermusik.net/
http://www.kindermusikwithangie.blogspot.com/

Classes Starting Soon

My winter/spring classes will be starting soon.  Please visit my website at http://www.kindermusikwithangie.kindermusik.net/ or call 503-708-2827 to sign up today!