Kids learning an instrument.

[gemmummy]

Hello, this is a new topic for me. I don't play anything but we are a musical family in that we all love to listen to a wide and varied range of music. Anyway, my lad is nearly 4 and he is really into music of all types and I was wondering if it was something I should try and nuture and get him playing something, or should I just let him go with the flow. We never had the money as kids for music lessons so I don't know what age kids start. Anyway, all ideas and suggestions welcome.

Hello, a good starting instrument would be the recorder which you can play simple and complex songs on and it is a good beginner for further playing on the clarinet and saxophone. Also the piano/keyboard is an excellent starting instrument. When I was younger I started piano and violin at the age of 6 and continued till I was almost 12 and moved to Singapore, the problem was at this age I lost interest but I am so glad that I learned at a younger age because for the past few years I have been teaching myself songs that I wish to play on the piano instead of what a teacher told me to play. Everyone needs a teacher to learn the basics but after that you can go on to play whatever you wish to. I hope this helps.

Unless he is quite advanced I wouldn't advocate starting to play the recorder as ime at 4 most DC are not coordinated enough and have difficulty realising that they have to start playing left-handed. Otoh if you are teaching him one-to-one maybe and he will listen to you, maybe he may learn a lot. However, I would wait until he is 5. You could start on tapping the beat with different types of music, tapping feet, shoulders, clapping hands. You could get even a child's xylophone/piano and get him to move bodily high and low, depending on the note. So far as I recall ELC have some musical instrument sets, but I don't know if you can get stuff cheaper off e-bay.

You can search on the net for children's music lessons, such as the storm and get him to choose the instruments for the storm coming nearer and going away again.

A lesson I did last week was a rainstorm starting - moving fingers only like raindrops up and down a window.

Storm gets nearer - fingers and arms up and down

Storm overhead - drumming hands softly then louder on the table

and then storm goes away a bit - fingers and arms

Storm dying - fingers only as above.

It is better if you can find a story or a rhyme on a CD or the net to go with that so that the both of you do the actions with a third party saying the words. HTH