My daughter loves musical instruments (I wonder where she got that from). She is two years old now. I take her to weekly Music Together classes and when the instruments come out, she gets incredibly excited. We also have a bunch of instruments here for her. While she does attempt to play piano, most of her instruments are smaller. She loves to blow into whistles and recorders, and to play with the keys on flutes. She has two sets of bongo drums and two other little drums. She likes to lay them out in a line and count to six as she plays them. She also likes to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star while playing an instrument (piano, drum, rhythm sticks, etc, and she has played most of it correctly on the piano, though she doesn’t do that consistently yet). Last night my mom was visiting. Four of us (my mom, my husband, Joey and I) were in the den and Joey started passing out drums to us. She played one and sang Twinkle Tiwnkle while we all played along. Every time, she’d pass out something new to each of us and herself (rhythm sticks, tambourine, etc.). She picked up a recorder (and it happend to be THE recorder than I learned on in school when I was six) and started blowing into it while humming Twinkle Twinkle. The really cute and beautiful part for me, though, was that she put her hands in perfect whistle position and moved her fingers while she played, mimicking what she sees when I play whistle.
when my kids were little, there was a “play” electronic violin that had a bow you moved across it and it played songs. We were at one of those “interactive” toy stores, and one of them picked it up, sat down, and laid it across their lap to play it. The shop person said “no - that’s wrong” - and I had to explain how they had seen me playing mountain dulcimer.
Jessie, it is such a thrill when kids show an early love and natural understanding of music! How cool!
Missy, my kids had one of those violins, and all loved to play with it. They had been around a couple of fiddlers from womb-time onward, so always held it as a fiddle. It was a sad day when it died.
I think that it’s best to introduce kids to music young. That way they get hooked before they are old enough to worry about whether they actually have any tallent. For me, at least that was important. I got hooked on music–first listening to my relatives play various instruments, then playing with a toy saxophone, then playing recorder–before I found out that I had no sense of rhythm and was nearly tone deaf. I don’t think I would have stuck with it long enough to develop a sense of rhythm and an ear had I not already learned to love music.
Well hello there, Jessie-pie. Really glad to hear from you. Have you been lurking or just so busy being a Mum that you haven’t quite got as much time as you used to for chiffing?
Enjoy the precious moments with her little ladyship. And don’t just take photos or rely on memory: write down the things - happy and even frustrating moments, impressions, mispronunciations - that strike you as unforgettable, in twenty or forty years’ time you’ll be so moved to rediscover them.
But bear in mind that C&F is a family-oriented forum, and try to avoid mentioning the R-word, which some readers may find offensive .
Yeah, same thing with my son when he was two (now three). Can someone tell me, why the first thing what every little kid do with instruments is trying to get as loud voice as possible out of those. My son for example loved to run away from me blowing constantly on Generation G whistle damaging my already Generation affected ears?
Also I noticed that with piano, the first step was trying to make as much noise as possible. Then the second step was using just one hand and finger and playing all the notes possible. Now he is at he third stage, with involves using of both hands, sometimes other hand playing the black and other the white keys. I wonder what happens next?
I’ve just been handing out whistles to kids of around nine years old who wanted to play the tune I was playing (it was The Little Red Lark).
All four of them looked at me carefully, put their hands and fingers in the positions I showed them, and then blew as hard as they could, moving their fingers about at random. I wasn’t showing them more than the first two notes.
The little dears.
Eventually one of them managed two bars of Twinkle Twinkle…
(Oh, and can you wipe your mouth AND swallow what you are eating before you put your mouth to one of my whistles, please? Thank you. )
I gave my grandkids each a Walton LBW about six months ago. The three-year old still “plays” it loudly and my daughter-in-law still lets me in her house. Music truly is the universal language!
Joey has a remarkable sense of music. She isn’t too loud. She plays softly and sings melodically (and it tune). When she hears a song or tune in a minor key, she says the music is sad.
She danced to music when I was pregnant with her. Her brother (still in me) dances to food. Uh-oh.
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