Music

Don't you just love the internet? There is such a wealth of information available at our fingertips.

Today I'm going to share some resources I've found for studying music.

Listen to Classical music for free! - Classical Archives is a great site for listenting to classical music. You can download up to 5 Mp3's daily for free or for $25/year, you can get unlimited daily downloads. For my needs, 5 a day is plenty. I plan for us to listen to classical music during our lapbook time.

Free Guitar Lessons - I found tons of free guitar lessons on the internet by doing a google search for guitar lessons. Here are just a few of the ones I found. Lessons for Absolute Beginners, Video Lessons, Guitar Player World. Disclaimer: I cannot guarantee that these sites are 100% kid friendly! Please, parent, check them out for yourself before allowing your child to use any of these sites!!

Free Piano Lessons - Again, I found tons of free piano lessons by doing a google search. This site looked the best to me of all the ones I looked at! Zebra Keys offers over 50 lessons for piano as well as links to several helpful resources, such as a virtual keyboard and free sheet music!

Hymn Studies - Even though many of our churches today use more contemporary forms of worship, I feel that there is still great value in having our children learn the old hymns. In fact Ambleside Online recommends studying three hymns each term of the school year (3 term year if following Ambleside). This wonderful site includes an alphabetical listing of many, many hymns and more being added on a regular basis. There is an overall explanation for each hymn, a brief biography of the writer, an explanation of each stanza including the lyrics to each stanza and Bible verses to support the concepts presented in the song. We actually have our own hymnals that we use when learning hymns. We got ours from a friend who's church bought new hymnals and just wanted to get rid of the old ones. Check your local churches, they may have hymnals just waiting for you to take them home! You can also purchase them rather reasonably from your local Christian book store. Rod and Staff also sells hymnals ranging in price from $7.25-$14.50. They do not have a website, you can contact them by phone at 888-271-6392. Edit - I found a website that sells Rod & Staff materials. This is not the "official" Rod & Staff site.

Composer Studies - You can use Wikipedia to help with your composer studies. You will find useful information about each composer there. Here are some great, free notebooking pages for your study of composers. At this same site you can also purchase a nice set of composer notebook pages for $5.95. I also purchased a great book called Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers by Patrick Kavanaugh from Amazon. I got it used and paid less that $8 with shipping.

Well, I'm sure there is plenty more out there, but hopefully, this list is enough to get you started studying music with your children!

Until next time,

~Linda~