Morning Music

For music appreciation I do "morning music." During the week Sparkle, Glitter, and I have breakfast together and listen to music. My current system is easy-peasy and works for us.

Some weeks I check a CD out of the library. We'll listen to the same CD every morning for a week. So far the CDs that I've picked tend to have stories with them. We've listened to several of the Classical Kids CDs (Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery, Mozart's Magic Fantasy, Mr. Bach comes to Call, Hallelujah Handel). We've also listened to a couple of the Beethoven's Wigs CDs. We're curently listening to Peter and the Wolf. I find that the first morning I'm a little lost when listening, but by the end of the week I can follow along the story and recognize bits and pieces of the music.

Peter and the Wolf has been particularly nice because of the way the musical instruments portray the characters in the story. The CD we borrowed starts by playing short selections of music, and the narrator names the musical instrument and character it portrays. Before listening to the CD, I thought that the story was related to the boy who cried wolf story, but it isn't at all.

On the days when I don't have a CD from the library, I have Themes to Remember, volume I. Since I own this CD, I loaded it on my iPod. The selections on this CD are really short, so we listen to all the "themes" for a particular time period to fill up breakfast. The kids like looking at the pictures in the book while listening to the music.

On days when I just want something different, we'll listen to something else on my iPod. When Sparkle's dance recital did "Sleeping Beauty" we listened to the bit of Tchaikovsky I have. Around Sparkle's birthday, we listened to the song that my brother composed for her. She really liked that.