Musical Initiation and Music Laboratories
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At "Coral," we offer group music initiation classes for children as young as two. Children come in small groups for an hour every week, and the main goal is to introduce them to the world of music and its sounds. We focus on three basic aspects:
1) THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HEARING SENSE. Here, through different games, we learn to recognize sounds and timbres, voices and instruments. We create games to listen to silence. We learn the concepts of speed (fast and slow), intensity (loud and soft), and pitch (high and low sounds).
2) VOICE DEVELOPMENT. Here, the song plays a very important role. We try to help the children sing melodies effortlessly, and to do so, we consider lyrics, melody, rhythm, and tonality. At two years old, the song will be a single verse long and cover a narrow range of notes. It will gradually become more complex as the group allows.
3) THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SENSE OF RHYTHM. To incorporate the notions of rhythm, we use our bodies and percussion instruments. With our bodies, we can mark the pulse and accent of a melody. With claves, triangles, tambourines, maracas, xylophones, cajitas, guiros, and others, we can reproduce a wide variety of rhythms.
All of these objectives come together in different ways within each meeting. For example, we can create a sound story, where we pretend we're in a movie theater, but instead of watching the movie, we make it ourselves. A story is told, and the children provide the sounds, voices, and movement.
Every week we embark on a journey on a magical boat that travels the world to learn about the different people who inhabit it, their tastes, their music, and their rhythms. It's a journey on a magical boat through time to learn about the evolution of music: the sounds made by primitive man, the music of antiquity, the Renaissance, classical music, modern music, rock and jazz, tango and rap. It's a journey to nature, to the four seasons, to the cold, the rain, the sun, and the wind. It's a journey to the mountains and sometimes to the sea.
To travel to all these places, we learn songs, record ourselves, get on stage, and sing into a microphone. We learn to listen and reproduce different timbres and sounds. We play all the instruments in the rhythm band: from the toc toc to the metallophone, including cymbals, the triangle, tambourines, and drums. We use our bodies to mark different rhythms. We create our own stories and set them to music. And above all, we enjoy sharing this activity with friends of the same age who also love music.
