Non-Core Hour Ideas: Music

Okay, so we Missouri homeschoolers all know we need 600 hours of core subjects per year, but how do we fill the 400 non-core hours? Sure, you could just have your child reinforce core skills – we aren’t required that the remaining hours be something other than math, language arts, social studies, and science. But why do that to your children? Give them a much-needed break and allow them to enrich their lives by offering some creative topics for study. Some areas are rich with classes for homeschoolers. In our immediate area, we have gymnastics, archery, art, choirs, and bands. These are just the non-core offerings, and there may be even more that I am not aware of. Whether or not you have access to homeschool classes, almost every area will have a music teacher of some sort.

Putting your children into music lessons is a sure-fire way to fill some of that time. Here’s what I recommend: a 30 minute lesson once a week and 30 minutes of daily practice time. (Including lesson day, and here’s why: the sooner the student gets to the piano after his lesson, the better his retention will be – thus making it easier on him in the long run and improving his progress overall.) That totals an hour of music on lesson days, and 30 minutes on subsequent days.

If you would like to stretch those daily half hour sessions to an hour, I have come up with a few ideas for you. (If an hour or 30 minutes is too long for your child’s attention span, you can easily break the practice and extras down into 15-minute increments.)

Piano Play: Allow your child to sit in front of the piano and just make things up. Show him how to make simple chords (you can YouTube it or ask your music teacher) and improvise a melody. Or just let him experiment and see what kinds of sounds and rhythm he can come up with on his own. Children often enjoy this unstructured play time, and it can be a great stress reliever (especially if you allow them to express their emotions through the volume and tempo).

Flashcards/Theory: If you really want to get your children’s music lessons off to a flying start, flashcards are a great way to reinforce primary concepts. You can help your child make some (look for tutorials online), you can download them for free, or you can find an app that quizzes your music-learner. You could even go all-out and buy a pack. 😉 Spending time with flashcards each week will greatly increase a beginner’s sight-reading capability.

Listening: Choose some classical music (or any other genre they are interested in) and allow your child to soak it up as they eat, play, or do homework (best if there are no lyrics). I would even count contemporary music listening as non-core hours if I were making it a point to analyze it in some way after listening: what makes country music different from pop? What instruments, rhythms, or techniques does this specific genre use that gives the listener a clue to what kind of music he is hearing? If the student is advanced, you could even discuss chord progressions and voicing.

Singing: Find some songs on YouTube or a sing-a-long, and have your children learn the words and melody. This reinforces their memory skills and can be quite enjoyable. Also, you could look for songs that would benefit other subject areas, such as math, science, history, etc. (If you have several kids, they can play musical chairs while learning by rote. I use this technique with my choir kids, and it’s a great way to get them to sing the same words over and over and over again without showing the slightest sign of boredom!)

Make Instruments: Help your kids make a cigar-box guitar or a bean shaker. You can find tutorials online. Percussion instruments can be made from almost anything. Next, model rhythms for your child, and have them mimic you on their very own hand-crafted instrument. (You can play the same game with melodies instead of beats if you feel like singing, lol.)

FreeImages.com/Adriano Carvalho

These are just a few non-core activities off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many more that I am missing. Subscribe to my blog, and be on the lookout for ways to get music-themed CORE hours.

 

Can you think of any more non-core ideas? Leave them in the comments below.

One-sided Conversation

Drugs. When I was in junior high, one of my best friends started dabbling in drugs. It was an extremely painful process for me. I had known all my life to “say no to drugs,” and I worried about her a lot. I specifically remember a conversation that I had with my dad one afternoon. Before he met my mother, he had experimented with pot. He explained to me how it made you feel and how it slowed down your thinking process.

Going through the motions. One thing that I remember in particular was a description of “conversation” between two people who are high. He said that two people could be sitting there talking to each other, but they were basically just going through the motions. Neither was listening to what the other had to say. One might talk about his new car, and the other might talk about his brother the whole time. Neither responds to what the other one says. Basically, they are just talking to themselves while facing one another.

One-sided conversation. The other day, I overheard two men talking to each other. One was the pastor of a church, and the other was a youth pastor at another church (judging by their conversation). Now neither of them had been experimenting with drugs (to my knowledge), but their conversation had the same one-sided qualities as the one described above. It seemed strange at first, but as their conversation progressed, it struck me just how common it was. Here are my thoughts:

No exchange of information. I would venture to say, that on some level, most conversations are just two people talking about themselves. Each participant will (usually) politely wait for the other participant/s to finish speaking; then they will say what they had decided to say 30 seconds ago. They can’t really listen to the first speaker because they might forget what it is that they really want to say. It’s funny if you happen to eavesdrop on two people who are doing this to each other. (Not funny if you catch yourself doing it.) They don’t really exchange information at all. Each comment makes them think of something else they really want to say, usually to one-up the other person’s comments. Every time each person speaks, they are continuing their own monologue from where they left off. They don’t take anything new with them when they leave the conversation, because they were “sharing” more than they were listening. I would be tempted to call this a waste of oxygen.

Challenge: Next time you find yourself doing this, try to stop imagining how interested “they” would be to hear your stories, and just listen. If you have a really bad habit, just ask questions instead of making comments.

A quick confession: I catch myself doing this all the time, to people I love and in whom I am genuinely interested. It’s a problem for me. Maybe I have made the common mistake of assuming everyone else is wired like me, so maybe I’m the only one who really needs to pay attention to this post!

Learning to Listen

When a friend or an acquaintance is going through a trial, probably the best thing you can do for them is to just show up and listen. Try not to give too much advice, unless the Lord specifically lays something on your heart. This is sometimes difficult to gauge because most of us are in love with the sound of our own voices. 🙂 I have found that the more time I spend in prayer, the more often God will give me exactly the right words at exactly the right moment. (On the other hand, I always mess things up if I try to figure out what I’m going to say ahead of time – I think because I try to force the conversation in a certain direction, rather than actually listening).

By learning to listen, you are giving your friends the much needed opportunity to work things out on their own. Either God will answer your prayers, and their troubles will dissolve, or He is allowing them to grow by seeing them through the crisis. If that turns out to be the case, they may need to talk things through and discover just what they are learning or how they are changing as a result of their current situation. We often merely need to chat for a while, asking questions, answering some of our own questions, and just basically meander through our own thoughts and feelings to reach a conclusion. I don’t know how many times I’ve had a “chat” with my sister, father, or husband in which they only said a couple of words; I did the rest of the talking, but by the time I ran out of things to say, I had pretty much figured out what I needed to do or learn. Anyway, your friends probably already know the answer, but they haven’t arrived at it consciously.