Prodigies Curriculum to Use with School Age Kids
Starting music lessons with school age kids is different than starting music lessons with preschoolers and toddlers and here we’ll share our best tips for getting started with school age kids.
If you’re enrolled in Prodigies and are looking to get started with school age kids, you’ll want to first determine how much experience they have already had with music.
If they’ve had some experience, start with our Primary series. This program dives into music theory and more difficult songs and performances.
Primary Prodigies is a more step-by-step curriculum. There’s a heavy emphasis on reading colorful yet properly notated sheet music in the treble clef, and slowly transitioning to black and white music, learning more musical vocabulary, understanding chordal and harmonic relationships through intervals, doing some basic I IV V analysis, ear-training and rhythmic dictations.
The format of Primary Prodigies is longer and more advanced than the videos and sections in Preschool Prodigies. Instead of featuring just one video per section, most of the sections in Primary Prodigies have 2-6 video in them. The videos usually consist of one or two lesson videos, a song video, a color and a black and white play-along video, and sometimes listening games, related songs, or more advanced sidebars.
If they’re brand-new to music but a bit older (say a beginner at age 8 or 9), one option is to use Preschool Prodigies Chapter 8 to introduce them to the program and assess what they already know. Some older kids will take issue with the name “Preschool Prodigies”, but if you allow them to play a few of the more challenging songs, they may come to understand that as a beginner, they can still find meaning in this level of the program.
Like anything, it’s best to begin at the beginning. Explain to your learner that it’s best to begin pitch training and musical learning early, so some of the content is geared toward preschoolers. That doesn’t mean that older kids and even adults can’t learn something new and helpful. With almost 500 videos in the program, there’s bound to be something that meets your older child’s needs.
Performance Prodigies is a scrolling sheet music series, that allows students to practice singing, hand-signing and playing without Mr. Rob or Ms. Sam in the video. This series can be a great way to introduce the program to an older kid, who has outgrown the preschool-focused lessons.
You can also find a ton of Orff styled tracks Performance Prodigies that contain a bell part, a Boomwhacker or chord accompaniment, lyrics, hand-signs and simple percussion parts all at once. A lot of these songs are straight from Preschool or Primary Prodigies, so you can mix and match this videos as you see fit to get your whole class playing on different instruments.
Prodigiesmusic.com offers a variety of series to help keep kids engaged in music. If your older learner doesn’t want to play the bells, Preschool, Primary and Performance can all be modified for the piano with a set of store bought or homemade chromanotes piano stick-ons.
If your learner doesn’t want to play the piano or the bells, we offer programs for singing & hand-signing, the recorder and the ukulele.
PsP Melodies consists of short exercises with the Solfege (Curwen) Hand-Signs. These are easy to use when you only have 3-5 minutes of time and/or don’t have any instruments at the ready. Melodies gives learners a chance to memorize Solfege, practice singing and familiarize themselves with the treble clef.
If your older child is ready to move onto other instruments, check out our Recorder Prodigies series. Our step-by-step Recorder program is easy to pair with other popular recorder methods and curriculum. Each section has a lesson or two as well as 3 or more songs in both color and black and white. More Recorder lessons are on their way, and you can also use the G A B Performance Prodigies Tracks for lots more scrolling G A B music.
Finally, Holiday Prodigies is a video series that pairs with our Holiday Prodigies songbook. This series is a great tool for planning a successful and joyous (at home or in school) winter recital. The sheet music is complete with Boomwhacker chord accompaniments and contains some of the more difficult songs that we have in the curriculum (Fur Elise, Hanukkah oh Hanukkah, etc). These more difficult songs, even if out of season, are a great way to engage older learners with music.