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7-9 Year-olds: 11/8/16
Here’s what we did this week… Move to the music; when the music stops, stop and clap 4 times. I had to tweak the directions to this until the music felt right to me. In the past, I have made it work with a signal (usually a high accented note from the piano). It ended…
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7-9 Year-olds: 11/2/16
We had a long break (4 weeks) after only a few classes. It was as if we had just seen each other last week, though. Here’s what we did: Warm-up: A group of children stand throughout the room. They cannot move unless they have the magic ball. The ball only retains its power if it…
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7-9 Year-olds: 9/27/16
The 4:45 group (7-9 year-olds) had their best session yet. Here’s what we did: Explore ways to walk (heels, toes, sideways, large steps, small steps, through molasses, without picking up your feet, etc.) Sometimes at this age, creativity can take a back seat for a while as skill mastery moves to the fore. In this…
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7-9 Year-Olds: September
Welcome parents and family members of the new Dalcroze class for 7 to 9-year-olds at the Lucy Moses School. I am pleased we were able to expand our program to include older children this year! Because it is sometimes difficult – even for adult Dalcroze students – to be able to articulate just what happened…
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A Class for 5-6 Year-olds
So many things can happen over the course of a Dalcroze semester that you can often get a better idea of what a class has been doing by simply describing a single class in detail. Here’s a description of a recent class of exceptional 5-6 year-old girls that I am fortunate enough to see every week.…
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Infrequently Asked Questions About Early Childhood Dalcroze Classes
Aside from one or two perennials, I don’t get asked too many questions during my Dalcroze classes for young children. With busy toddlers demanding attention, there just isn’t a lot of time for chatting. (There are one or two questions I am commonly asked. See if you can guess what they are – I’ll include…
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Drawing Music
For the past few weeks, you may have noticed your children leaving the classes clutching drawings. In the spring of the year, I usually begin to focus the children’s attention on ways that musical events and phenomenon can be visually represented. However, the longer I teach, the more I find myself delaying the introduction of…
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Leading and Following, Up and Down
Over the past few weeks the 4-5 year-old classes have been exploring several different aspects of musical experience that I have written about previously. Now that they are getting used to working together as part of a group, I like to give them opportunities to lead and follow. Recently gingerbread men and women have lead…
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Is my child gifted?
There is one comment that I often hear from parents that still catches me off guard: “He really responds to music!” The sentiment is usually expressed with a mix of surprise and awe, but seeing children respond to music with delight, enthusiasm, passion, abandon, inventiveness and curiosity would likely surprise few teachers of young…
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A Basic Structure for 4-5 year-old Dalcroze Classes
Hello Lucy Moses Summer Intensive 2013 participants, and anyone else interested teaching music to young children! As requested, here is an outline of the structure I use for my classes for young children. Though I do follow this basic plan for most of my classes, this represents only what works for me – there are…
Writing about music and music education from a Dalcroze perspective: