Music appreciation- what a laugh!

Little Notes

The fun loving Louise Bradbury and husband Mark of Horsham have set up a lovely series of music education workshops for pre school children and their families. It's a totally hands on experience where the children get to join in and be as creative as they like. Led by professional musicians, workshops in Horsham, Cardiff, Chichester, Harrow and Dorking are 40 minutes long and are once a week for a bargain £6 per child or £9 for two siblings. The sessions start with a fun warm up followed by activities based around a topic such as travel, friendships or animals. The wonderfully versatile professional musicians who lead the sessions encourage the kids to talk about the music and guide them as they explore sounds, shapes, rhythms and rhymes together. 

A different piece is chosen for every session which is played to the group who are encouraged to respond creatively: perhaps using movement, hand-held percussion and other stimuli. We  all know that even smart children from the ages  of 0-4 don't have the longest concentration spans, the pace and subjects change with regular frequency and nursery rhyme sing/play alongs are interspersed with 'chill outs' where the kids take a minute to lie down and imagine pictures in their heads to accompany the music being played. I'm especially impressed by the Bradbury's diverse, imaginative approach which seems to have the parents having as much of a laugh as the children! 
These workshops have been such a success in fact that the older kids wanted their own ones and so an after school Little Notes choir and recorder group meet weekly in Horsham for school age kids. This has been met with wild enthusiasm from local families and to top it all off, they've started 'build an opera', a week's course where children go along and create an opera of their very own from scratch. It is lead by a professional composer but the ideas all come from the children. They even build their own sets, make their own costumes and learn about stage direction and lighting. What an incredible opportunity!
Check out the Little Notes activities for your child at www.littlenotes.org