Learning Music for Kids (with FREE Printable)

Welcome to another series of 12 Months of Montessori.  For this month, I am going to feature our Montessori-inspired activities in learning music.


Different Types of Music

Mavi loves learning about music. We often hear different genre in stores like classical, rap, hip hop and ballads. He would often ask me “why are some people making sad music Mom?”.  Therefore, I decided to introduce Mavi to the different types of music.  How music is used to express one’s feelings, how it is used to pray, to entertain and how it symbolizes one’s origins.

Sorting Musical Instruments

Yesterday, we started our Montessori-inspired activities for Music.  This is in preparation for our Montessori Music post this coming Friday, the 17th of July for 12 Months of Montessori Series.

Now, I just wanted to highlight this activity, of sorting musical instruments.  There are lots of instruments out there, but I think it is important for the child to identify the groups or families of these instruments to understand how they work.


The Helpful Garden has this amazing file of musical instruments!  It was created as a Montessori 3-part cards, but in our activity, we sorted them out according to their categories.  So I started off by presenting the instruments to Mavi and how these instruments make sounds.  (We also watched videos on how these instruments are being used)

Guide to Space and Heavenly Bodies Study for Kids (with FREE Resources)

I’ve been planning this unit since last month because I wanted to prepare ahead of time. We’ve done A LOT of space and heavenly bodies unit in the past and I wanted to upgrade the lesson, add something new for Mavi to learn.  So right now, I’m sharing our Space and Heavenly Bodies Study for this year. I’m also putting a bunch of links from our previous lessons and activities for your reference. I hope you find this post helpful.

Space and Solar System

               
Solar System and Planets Part I
Solar System and Planets Part II
Planets and Solar System for Preschoolers
Moon Phases

        
The Moon
Phases of the Moon
A look at the Northern and Southern Sky
We looked into the star constellation maps seen in the northern and southern hemisphere.  This is to make Mavi aware that there are stars that can be seen in the northern part of the world but not visible on the other side.

                   
Stars and Constellations
For the details of our constellation study, click here or click the image below.  The material we used here is the Fantacolor pegboard.
Space Exploration History
I made chronological cards of the space exploration history.  The pictures and the fact cards were all taken and referenced from Wikipedia and Wiki Commons.  Though Mavi can read this straight from the site, I wanted to have something tangible and something that we can work on, like arranging the timeline and matching it with objects.

The cards I created contains the year and a title of the major event that occurred in that year.  The description is very much readable by kids though there were a few words that Mavi couldn’t pronounce well or he needed to ask me for the meaning.  Such a good material to improve reading skills, spelling and vocabulary!
After which, I showed him how we can arrange the cards according to their timeline.  This gives him a visual presentation of the order of events. 

Aside from arranging the cards chronologically, you can also use them to match objects.  Here we used Safari Toobs Space, Safari Toob Insects (fly) and Safari Toob Farm (dog).

So if you wanted to have a copy of the cards for Space History Timeline, click here for the link.
Parts of a Space Shuttle
The parts of a space shuttle is something that Mavi really looked forward to.  Oh boy he was so happy that I made him another “flying object”.  The first one was the Airplane Nomenclature Cards, and here’s the newest Space Shuttle Nomenclature Cards.  This is based on the NASA’s space shuttle design.  Using the cards, a child will learn the different parts of a space shuttle.  I wrote the parts’ functions in a notebook because I was out of ink.

To get a copy of the Space Shuttle Nomenclature Cards, click here.
Sensory Tub
Now, this is something I prepared for both of the boys to play with.  Xavi had his own Letter S: Star Unit study last week so it was timely that I prepared this Space Sensory Tub for the boys.  Figures are from Safari Toob Space, homemade PlayDoh planets and homemade Earth felt.

FREE Space Exploration History Learning Cards

We recently concluded our First Great Lesson part 3 which is all about the space and the solar system.  We were able to reuse our material of Space History Cards which I made years ago because Mavi was asking me all about how did NASA came to be.