Pre-Apprentice 2 - 1st/2nd Grade Music Course

My theory is that most homeschool parents either did not have a quality elementary music education themselves or do not remember it. I have no other explanation for why, when I went looking for something like this some years ago, it did not exist. Surely this gap should have been filled by now! Music Duo filled it, and I was delighted to find it two years ago when I started my 1st and 4th graders in Pre-Apprentice 2.

All the homeschool music curricula I have seen falls into a number of categories: music appreciation, music history, learning an instrument, music theory, or singing. These are all good things and by all means elementary students can and should learn some of all of these things - not just one of them! In Music Duo Apprentice 2 they will listen and engage with quality music, develop an experiential understanding of rhythm and pitch through singing, movement, and using simple instruments, and start to learn musical notation. All in bite-sized pieces. I had all this in my early music education and I wanted it for my kids. THIS is how you should start out in music. It will serve your child well whether they have a natural musical bent or can't carry a tune in a bucket. Have a musical child that you plan to pursue learning an instrument with? This will be an excellent entree. Have a kid that prefers sports and doesn't care for music? Well you don't let your kids not learn the alphabet because they're better at math, do you? Don't let your children end up musically illiterate.

I was singing in a sort of "pick up choir" a couple of years ago and sharing music with a young woman whom I knew to have a lovely voice and whom I learned had been homeschooled as a child. She was struggling (just a bit) with an unfamiliar part, and when I tried to point out the problem I found she had no idea what I was talking about pointing to the music. None of the notation meant anything to her. I don't just mean she couldn't really read it - I mean there was no common terminology we could even use. She said, "I always wanted to learn the piano, but..." I felt like saying, "Sweetheart, you don't need to learn the piano to learn this. You just needed elementary school music." Don't let that be your child!

A couple of notes beyond "you should use this curriculum." Most (but not all) of the games are better with a larger group than my family constitutes (3, sometimes 4 engaged in lessons.) If you did it with a co-op that would be a great set-up. It did help to put my kids together, even though their ages are pretty far apart. Does my older child feel it's young for him? A little. He still likes it. We started in Pre-Apprentice 2, and that worked well for us. They caught up what they had missed by not taking Apprentice 1 and got through Apprentice 2 material and the pace was appropriate. Is this course perfect? No. But it is the ONLY THING THAT DOES THIS for the homeschool market. (Disclaimer: Of course I can't possibly know that for sure, but I've looked a lot, and my local convention is the largest in the country.)