Tag Archives: Music

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Jax loves music. He LOVES it. If any song comes on, whether he’s heard it before or not, he is singing along. I’ve been collecting musical instruments for him, mainly from the thrift store. He loves to ask me to put music on for him while he “plays” along on his guitar or drums.

Arts are important in our family. I grew up in music and art. I have a Bachelors in Art Studio. My husband played in bands growing up and deejay-ed for years. We definitely want Jax to have strong roots in the arts from an early age.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Since Jax is only 3.5 years old, I needed to think of both his manual dexterity and his emotional maturity right now when planning our music homeschool unit. I needed something that he could use easily so that the frustration of not being able to make a note correctly was not a concern. I chose handbells. They are available in color-coded educational sets aimed to help children learn which bell plays which note. Music + Rainbows? Jax’s idea of heaven!

There are other choices that still let you start with color-coded notes (just make sure you are happy with the colors the instrument uses!) like a xylophone or Boomwhackers.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Thanks to my aunt, who values how dear music is to our family, Jax got his started handbell set. I chose the Kids Play Rhythm Band 8 Note Handbell Set because add-on sets were available should we need them in the future. They also use fairly standard colors.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Introducing Handbells

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and PrintablesWe started our music unit with some 3-part cards introducing musical instruments. Jax already recognized most of them, so it was mainly a review.

When our bells arrived, I started by presenting two bells on a tray with a mat and matching cards showing where each bell’s note is on the music staff. I showed him how the bells’ colors and letters match the cards, then we practiced sounding the bells and switching between the two notes. We moved on to playing the note on the card I held up. He had no problems, so I let him have a third bell. With all three matching note cards, we made patterns to play.

We continued on this way, earning a new bell about once a week. It took us about 2 months to work up to the full set of 8 bells. (He actually earned the last one the day we took photos.) I always include a rolled up felt mat on the handbell tray. Jax knows we have to unroll it and place it on the table for the bells. When playing the handbells, setting them on the mat dampens (cuts off) the ring. We started with two sheets of felt, but now use a long strip the width of our table.

Exploring with Handbells

There are a lot of ways your child can explore music and sound with handbells. Some of the things we’ve done are:

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

• I showed him that he could play two bells at once. We noted that it doesn’t sound good to play two bells that are next to each other at the same time. The discordance was obvious to him, but he hasn’t quite connected yet that skipping a bell when playing two at once sounds better. This is something I encourage him to explore.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

• We play find the bell – I ask him for a certain color/number/letter note and he plays it. When I ask for the lower C bell, I call it “middle C” (named for its position on a piano. The higher C is our newest bell, and I will be calling it “treble C”. You can also hold up the musical note cards and have them play the right bell.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

• Composing music can be done by preschoolers! Taking a cue from Montessori’s moveable alphabet, you can have the notes ready for your child to place on the music staff. Using control cards to help them place them on the correct line, they can arrange some notes and play their composition. My music notes are made of felt and involved no sewing for once!

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and PrintablesNew-Sew Felt Music Staff

Materials:

Start by cutting out your ovals. You need 8 red and 4 each of orange, yellow, green, aqua, indigo and violet. Using the narrow part of your paintbrush, sketch your letter onto the oval with fabric paint. By starting thin, you can adjust the size of your final letter: if you drew it too small, paint the final thick lines towards the outside of your sketch. If you drew it too big, paint the final lines towards the inside. I used the full width of my size 8 flat brush to make the final painted letters. This kept the lines a consistent width.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Take 4 of your red C’s and cut strips of black ribbon an inch wider than the oval. Coat the entire top of the ribbons trip with felt glue (including the raw edges to keep them from fraying.) Center the oval on top, press it down and allow it to dry. This adds ledger lines to the middle C’s that go below the staff.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Cut out as many rests as you’d like. I have two quarter rests for now. I’ve included the rectangle needed to make half and whole rests.

To make the staff, cut a 12″ strip out of your 36″ wide felt. You can adjust the width to suit your needs. 36″ is the width of our school table. You could even use the full 36″ x 36″ felt piece and make 3 rows of staff lines if you have room to lay or hang something that large. Using the spacing guide, glue 5 strips of ribbon down to the felt and allow it to dry before use. make sure you allow enough room at the bottom for middle C’s ledger line to be properly spaced.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

For now I am presenting the notes in a bowl with matching control cards and the rolled up staff chart. I think we will do some games in the future with matching and sorting the notes to each other and to the control cards.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Preschool Handbells Music Unit Printables

I have a lot of printables for this unit – many I haven’t even started using yet. Before I use them, each printable will get laminated. I also like to mount my 3-part cards to colored paper or card stock prior to laminating.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Colored Music Note Control Cards

These cards show the position of each of the notes used in the 8 note handbell set. They are color coded to match the bells. Later I will make a new set that do not have color. Grab the free printable here. (This file was updated on 01/16/14 to fix the wrongly-positioned B. You can also get a page with just the fixed B cards here.)

Music Symbol 3-Part Cards

This is a set of Montessori-style 3-part cards that cover basic music symbols. So far I’ve only given him a few of the cards to start getting used to seeing. You can download the free printable here.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

Twinkle, Twinkle & Ode to Joy

I wrote up the music to two fairly easy songs that can be played with the first 6 notes in the handbell set. For now, I play them for him and we use them as reference to set up his felt staff so Jax can play small excerpts. You can grab the song sheets here.

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

We are having so much fun with our music unit! Have you done any music homeschool lessons with your preschooler? I’m excited to see where Jax goes with music as he grows older.

Here is a Pinterest ready picture for you!

Preschool Handbells: New-Sew Felt Musical Notes and Printables

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Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

The giveaway is now closed. Thanks for playing!

Jax and I will be starting a music unit in homeschool this fall, so when I came across this Musical Instruments TOOB by Safari LTD I had to get them!

Our family has always had a great love of music. My brother and I were both “band geeks” throughout our school years. (Though I find nothing geeky about music!) I played the oboe, and still have mine. I was also in the marching band, playing cymbals in the drum line. I married a DJ and we’ve surrounded Jax with music since before he was born. He adores dancing and singing. Anything we can put in a song he learns faster. I hope that providing him with a solid base of knowledge in music fundamentals now will help cultivate a lifelong love.

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

Disclosure: I purchased this Safari Ltd TOOB on my own, but Safari Ltd kindly is providing the winner of this giveaway with a Musical Instruments TOOB. All opinions expressed are my own.

Musical instruments are beautiful to look at! They definitely capture a child’s attention. And combined with learning about the sounds that they make, you have a learning opportunity that is all fun!

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

The Safari Ltd Musical Instruments TOOB contains: Trombone, Flute, Saxophone, Classical Guitar, French Horn, Clarinet, and Trumpet. Strike up the band!

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

Safari Ltd TOOBS are collections of individually hand painted miniature replicas featuring vibrant colors, fine, professional sculpting, and accurate detail. They are available in dozens of themes, and each set comes in a reusable acetate tube that snaps open and closed for easy storage. The tube also has a spinning globe on its cap. TOOBS are perfect for educational projects, traveling, collecting, and imaginative play.

Safari Ltd® is a family-owned, educational toy company whose mission is to teach children the importance of nature and its conservation through the joy of play. With more than 1,000  hand-painted products ranging from mythical creatures to famous landmarks, learning meets fun with Safari Ltd.

Safari Ltd

Montessori Musical Instruments 3-Part Cards

In the Montessori method, 3-part cards are an essential tool that can follow your child through multiple levels of development. They can be used in any subject to aid in adding vocabulary, learning to sort/classify, reading practice and so much more. Three-part cards are made up of two photos – one with a label, one without – as well as a separate label. Younger children start with the labeled card to help them learn the vocabulary. One of the best ways to use them is with small objects that match the photos. Older kids can work with the unlabeled card, matching the correct words or writing their own.

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

I have created a set of free musical instrument 3-part cards to correspond with Safari Ltd’s Musical Instruments TOOB. Because I had room for one more card on my printout, I included an oboe. I used an oboe necklace charm (and my real oboe!) for matching. You could set that card aside when doing object matching.

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

Click here to download my free pdf file to create your own. To make mine, I cut them out, glued them to charcoal gray card stock (this is simply a color I chose to assign to all my future music collateral) then laminated them. It makes them shiny and strong. I really love my laminator – as everyone told me I would!

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

Musical Instruments and Their Sounds

Here is a collection of video links you can play to listen to each instrument’s sound and learn more about them: Trombone, Flute, Saxophone, Classical Guitar, French Horn, Clarinet, and Trumpet. (And Oboe!)

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables  Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables  Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

Bookmark this page to come back to when you are studying instruments with your child.

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

Musical Instruments TOOB Giveaway

1 lucky winner from the US will win the Safari Ltd Musical Instrument TOOB (ARV $12). If you a a follower of Safari Ltd on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube or Google+, they will throw in a bonus prize!

Who is Eligible:

This giveaway is open to anyone 18 and older living in the US. Safari Ltd. will pay for shipping the prize to you.

To be eligible, leave a mandatory blog comment below telling me why you’d like to win the Safari Ltd Musical Instruments TOOB. After you’ve commented, be sure to click “enter” on the Rafflecopter form to open up the additional entry options. Enter as many ways as you’d like, once you’ve completed the mandatory blog comment. If you are already a follower of Safari Ltd or Imagine Our Life, you can still enter via that option by verifying your username!

If you need help with Rafflecopter here is a link for a quick tutorial video. At times, the Rafflecopter form can take a minute to load on the page.

The giveaway closes 12:00 am EST on Tuesday, September 3.

winnerCongrats to our random winner, Mae P.!

Good luck!

Here is a Pinterest-ready image for you! Find me on Pinterest @imagineourlife. Find Safari Ltd on Pinterest @safariltd.

Safari Ltd. Musical Instruments Giveaway & Free Montessori Printables

This post is linked up to Montessori Mondays. Please pay it a visit for lots of great Montessori and homeschool ideas!

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Flash Mob Babywearing

Photo © Charlotte Geary Photography

For a few weeks last month, Jax and I had a secret. We were in rehearsals for a flash mob!

How does one find out about a flash mob? Word of mouth, mostly. I was lucky to have an online friend move into a new house just a few doors down from T, the lady who was organizing the mob. When I jumped at the chance to be a part of something I’ve loved watching online, C gave me the address and time of the next rehearsal. I was a very shy child, but I’ve come a long way since then. I was very proud of myself for showing up at T’s door and introducing myself and Jax. Of course Jax is so cute that he’s always a great ice breaker!

I follow a lot of AP parenting techniques, and babywearing is a big one for me. I have worn Jax since the day he came home from the hospital and we’ve used a number of different carriers. (I will review my current carrier, the Beco Gemini, in an upcoming post.) I did yoga with Jax in a carrier from 2 months till 11 months when our local studio closed. Jax loves music, moving/dancing and happy crowds, so I thought this would be perfect.

I think everyone was surprised to see a baby (toddler, really) strapped to my chest, but as soon as the music came on and we started moving, Jax was laughing and clapping along. He won everyone’s hearts in an instant. The practices we went to were right around naptime, so I often ended up nursing him to sleep in the carrier while dancing. I’m not sure how he could sleep while bouncing, but he was out like a light almost every time once we’d been dancing for a while.

On the day of the mob, Jax was excited when the music started. He knew it well from hearing it so often while I practiced. The mob was a mashup of 8 songs. We came in for the last 3, as the one right before that had to much whipping around for a baby in a carrier. He clapped, smiled and waved his arms as soon as the music started. We both had a great time!

I was really sad when it was all over. I hope another flash mob comes up so we can do it again before Jax is too big for the carrier!

Here is a video clip of us sent to me by an onlooker and another I found: