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Thinking about Music

It probably makes sense that I have thought a lot about how I want to incorporate music into my homeschool.  It is my area of expertise.  I know that it may not be a top priority for a lot of educators but learning about, appreciating, and creating music will (hopefully) be an important part of my kids' educations.  Because it's a big deal to me.

My goal is to raise adults who can use music to bless their own lives and communities.  I would like our home to be what John M. Feierabend called "a tuneful, beatful, artful learning community."  I believe that the way to accomplish this is by teaching my children to use their own bodies to make and respond to music.

I try to incorporate a lot of singing and some dancing (probably not enough) into our Kindergarten.  I hope to tackle this even more seriously as we begin formal grade school.  There are some lovely music curriculae out there that look appealing but they tend to be very pricey, so I am hoping to jerry-rig my own for free.  I will probably use the Ambleside Online schedule to organize composer study units.

Here are some of the ways I would like to explore music in our home:
* singing hymns and folk songs
* piano (or harp) lessons
* dancing to classical music
* drawing, painting, storytelling, or writing to classical music
* learning to sing with solfeggio syllables and hand signs

If I want my children to find value in studying and making music, I feel it is important to lead by example.  So I have been thinking a lot lately about an exciting project: a harp/storytelling concert that incorporates stories from Norse mythology.  We read a lot of Norse myths in our family and I am excited about pairing it with snippets of Wagnerian opera arranged for the harp.  Yeah, that would be pretty cool.

But brainstorming for this concert has lead to another idea:   It would be an exciting project for me to give a harp concert each year, centered around music written by composers we had studied.  That would certainly go a long way towards familiarizing my kids with the music I love as well as showing them that its study was worthwhile.

Anyways, these are just a few of my thoughts about music in homeschool.
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