Introducing Classical Music to Kids
I’ve been working on gathering our music resources for this next fall. I want to introduce the kids to a bit of classical music. I’d like them to have a little more familiarity with some of the famous composers.
I found this CD, The Idiots Guide to Classical Music, used at our local used bookstore for 99cents. It has small snippets from many, many famous pieces. It has 99 tracks! It is perfect for listening to short sound-bytes, though it leaves me and Hubby yearning for more when the beautiful pieces come to a quick end. This’ll be pretty useful this year and the kids loved it on their first listen. Again, the snippets are very brief, but I love the guide that comes with it. The guide tells you who wrote it, what movie you might have heard it in and where you can find this.
I also browsed through and bought a number of collections in the used CD section. If you don’t have much in the way of classical music, you might check out your local used bookstore or local library.
The other resource I’ll add in this year is called Classical Music for Beginners. It is in a comic-book style and I think it will be appealing to the kids. The biography on each of the composers is 1-3 pages.
I also have Classical Music for Dummies which we may use. That comes with its own CD, but the book is a bit dense for my kids.
Some free classical music resources are available at Homeschool Share. See their page, Connections Classical Composters which has lapbook and minibook pages, book lists and more:
Also see the free resources at Homeschool Share on Melody which includes instruments, the National Anthem, Composers and Conductors and more.
Another resource that you may be interested in is Erica’s World’s Greatest Composers Study which she sells at her website ($5.50), Confessions of a Homeschooler:
At some point soon I’ll share some of the games and resources I’ve found for introducing kids in a fun way to music notes and rhythm. I’ve found a lot of free, useful materials and spent a couple of hours printing out and laminating things last week!!
