MUSIC THE MONTESSORI WAY

LEARN HOW TO TEACH A MUSIC CURRICULUM TO YOUNG CHILDREN IN THE CLASSROOM

Parents often ask about music in the Montessori classroom and many teachers don't have a clue about this.

 As parents, what would you ideally want your children to be exposed to in music classes in their early years?  You would probably want your child to learn some lovely songs and to sing enough that they learn to carry a tune.  You might want them to receive a bit of ear training, because you’ve heard that this is the age when children either develop this skill or go through life unable to distinguish pitch.  You would probably hope that they would be exposed to a variety of musical expressions and perhaps a bit of music history.  You might even hope for an introduction to musical notation.  It may surprise you to learn that as a teacher, you can provide all of that and more in the Montessori or any classroom.

The operative term here is “in the classroom.”  Rather than being confined to a music class for an hour once per week (about the most you can hope for in most schools, and increasingly hard to find these days), in Montessori these activities are included in the daily life of the class and respected at the same level as any other form of learning.

ONE of the materials used to teach music in the classroom is the Montessori Bells. The Bells consist of two series of bells ranging from middle to high “C.”  One series is painted black or  white, and correspond to the black and white keys of the piano.  The other set, which we will call the “brown bells,” are unpainted with a natural wood finish.

These bells represent the diatonic scale of 8 notes (C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C).   The children work with these bells extensively in a specific method which teaches them to match and grade the notes by ear alone. Could there be better “ear” training than this?

 In Montessori we always provide experience first, before attaching language, and the Bells are no exception.  Only after this rich matching and grading experience, we teach children the names of the notes and their position on the musical staff.  The children begin to learn to write and read music, in a similarly natural manner to the way that they learned to write and read words.

But the Bells don’t begin to encompass all of the ways that children experience and learn about music as part of the daily life of the classroom.  

Register for this course and get a full montessori music curriculum with adequate training  on how to teach it with a Free Music teachers manual .