Now Available: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Preschool Piano Camp!

April 22, 2014 Jennifer Boster

Well guys, I am very excited to announce that we finally have our Early Explorers: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Camp available for purchase! It’s been a long time coming. Many of you have already purchased and taught our Spring, Autumn and Winter lesson plans and have probably been wondering when our Summer plan would be available. Well we finally have it up and ready to go, and we think you are going to love it! We are offering all four lesson plans, along with some camp-planning extras, in one nifty bundle.

If you are looking for a fun summer music camp for preschoolers, look no further. This Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Piano Camp will introduce your young students to a year of music, going through each season from Spring through Winter. It works perfectly as a week-long, four-day camp, or as a month-long once-a-week class. This camp includes the following lesson plans: Spectacular Spring, Sizzling Summer, Amazing Autumn and Wondrous Winter.

Students will explore the four seasons through song, play, stories, movement, listening and art. Musical concepts covered in this four-lesson camp include: high and low, introduction to the keyboard, introduction to the musical staff, solfege, fast and slow, composition, beat, rhythm, one note versus many notes (chords), and more! Students will learn some music terminology (lento, largo, vivace, andante, tempo, staff, keyboard, etc.). They will make and take home several fun crafts (a springtime scene, paper flower hats, wearable fairy wings and turtle shells, a homemade drum and a snowman craft).

Children will be introduced to several pieces of classical music, including Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter from Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons; To Spring by Edvard Grieg; Summertime by George Gershwin; Summer Fairy by Sergei Prokofiev; Tortoises from Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saens; Flying Leaves by Carl Kolling; and Troika by Sergei Prokofiev.

Most importantly, students will play, jump, dance, sing, move, explore, listen, create, and have a blast as they experience and discover the joy of music!

The bundle includes a Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Camp Planner packet, chock-full of forms and documents to help you plan and organize your class. It includes registration forms, participant rosters, flyers, certificates of completion and more. We’ve done all the work for you to make your summer preschool music camp planning a breeze.

For those who purchase the lesson plans separately, the Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Camp Planner will also be available for separate purchase.

For more information on each individual lesson plan, please visit the Lesson Plans page of The Teaching Studio Store!

But first, can I tell you about our summer lesson plan? Because it is so much fun! We call it Sizzling Summer!

In this lesson, children learn all about fast and slow in music. We use Vivaldi’s Summer to tell and act out a story about Tempo Forest and the fairies and forest animals who live there. We meet lots of fun animals that move fast and slow!

We do some fun summertime movement activities to help us learn about fast and slow in music. The children are introduced to Gershwin’s Summertime and we learn and sing some new words that help us remember a musical word for slow!

We make and decorate some adorable fairy wings and turtle shells that students get to wear and take home! And if your students are anything like my daughter, they will not want to ever take them off…..

(The lesson plan includes printable templates with full instructions on how to assemble the fairy wings and turtle shells.)

And what is summertime without a lemonade stand? Our Musical Lemonade Stand activity teaches about fast and slow rhythms in music, composition and listening.

Here are a few sample pages from the lesson plan so you can get a better idea of what it includes:

I hope you enjoy our Sizzling Summer lesson plan, and the complete Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Preschool Piano Camp! They would make an awesome addition to your summer teaching plans. Purchase in the Shop.

Early Explorers: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

Preschool Piano Camp

Includes: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Camp Planner

Spectacular Spring!

Sizzling Summer!

Amazing Autumn!

and

Wondrous Winter!

Price: $38.00

Digital download

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Camp Planner
19 pages of forms & documents
to help plan your Early Explorers camp
Includes: registration forms, participant rosters, flyers,
certificates of completion and more!
Price: $5.00
Digital download
Sizzling Summer! Lesson Plan

187 pages, Digital download
Price: $10.00

Lesson Plan Added: Traffic Jam! (and our giveaway winner!)

July 22, 2012 Jennifer Boster

2 Comments

Mighty Musicians! (…plus a giveaway!!)

July 15, 2012 Jennifer Boster

27 Comments

Featured Posts, Uncategorized

Happy Saturday!

Well as some of you may have noticed, I haven’t been around a lot lately. I’ve been a bit busy….my friend Nichole and I recently wrote a whole new curriculum and taught a new music class for 5- and 6-year-olds. We call it Mighty Musicians and it was a big success! We are so excited to share it with you all, and I’ve been working like crazy getting these lesson plans all ready to go.

Our Mighty Musicians class is similar to the Early Explorers course (and I *promise* to have more of those lesson plans available soon as well!), but geared toward those 5- and 6-year-olds who are able to catch on and then apply the musical concepts a little more quickly than the preschoolers. This class is very fun, and it involves lots of singing and movement and creative play with the music, but it also has some basic piano technique elements involved to give those kids a great and fun intro to piano lessons! At each class, students get to play simple pre-staff notation pieces at the piano, and they also get to compose their very own songs! We learn about some famous composers and their music and just have a blast singing and moving and listening.

We have five lesson plans that will soon be available for this class (for either a week-long camp or a five-week course). Each lesson is for a one-hour session. Our plan is to get a new one up and available each week….so stay tuned!

TODAY, the first lesson plan, Night & Day: Music Tells a Story, is available for purchase on my “Lesson Plans for Sale” page, and we will also be giving away ONE free copy to a lucky reader!!

The format of the lesson plan is a downloadable e-book, which is awesome because once you purchase it you can print out as many copies of the pages as you need for your class. It is 82 pages chock full of awesomeness…aside from the actual lesson plan and teacher’s guide, there are plenty of resources, printables, songs, clipart, and visual aids, and it also includes a ten-page student take-home book! We think you’re going to love it 🙂

So a little about this lesson plan – we talk about how music tells a story! We do this all within the fun theme of “Night & Day.” We go over some basic musical elements, learn a little about Edvard Grieg and a couple of his famous pieces, sing and move to his music, improvise at the piano, write our own compositions using the musical elements we learned about, learn some basic keyboard topography and play a simple piano piece!

Here are some sneak peeks into the lesson plan and its contents –

So would you like to win a FREE copy of this lesson plan? Just leave a comment! You may receive ONE extra entry into the giveaway by posting about this giveaway on your blog or facebook page (leave an extra comment to let me know you did it). Giveaway ends on Friday, July 20 at 11:59 pm Central time. I’ll announce the winner next Saturday.

Giveaway!: High & Low Preschool Music Lesson Plan

April 9, 2012 Jennifer Boster

99 Comments

Featured Posts, Uncategorized

Happy Monday, everyone! I am super excited today to announce a giveaway here on The Teaching Studio!

First of all, I’d like you all to meet my friend Nichole:

Nichole is a wonderful teacher and a dear friend. For the past year she and I have been collaborating on and teaching preschool piano camps and classes together. We’ve spent hours planning, brainstorming, writing curriculums, making up songs, creating all sorts of crafts and visual aids, cutting out lots and lots and lots of paper (our husbands see us get out the scissors and lovingly roll their eyes), and enjoying teaching the joy of music to preschoolers. We have just loved it! Our curriculum has changed and evolved over the past year, and we are getting really excited about how much fun this class is!

The children who attend our class have such a great time. And they are really learning a lot! We love it when their parents tell us that their child has been singing the songs from class all day long! Or when we hear that they have told their parents all about what they have learned.

Well, we really want to share our class with YOU and make it possible for others to share our fun lessons with their own students. We have been working really hard getting our first lesson plan all ready so that others will be able to purchase it as a pdf download.

Because we are so excited about it, this week we are going to give away TWO free copies of our Spectacular Spring!: High & Low lesson plan!

Now, this is not just a little ol’ lesson plan. This includes a basic lesson plan, a teacher’s guide with lots of teaching tips and suggestions to help you prepare to teach your class, and about fifty pages (yes, fifty) of great resources (songs, clipart, printables, teaching aids, templates, craft tutorials, take-home booklets, etc.) to make your class super fun and memorable.

This lesson plan includes everything you’ll need to teach an awesome one-hour class about High & Low in music. Everything is based on the theme of Spectacular Spring! We will share a little more about our fun lesson plan throughout the week. For now, these objectives of our lesson plan will give you an idea of what it’s all about! It will be available for purchase next week.

To enter this giveaway, you can do one or more of the following (please leave a separate comment for each entry letting me know that you did it – thanks!):

Follow or subscribe to The Teaching Studio
“Like” The Teaching Studio on Facebook
Follow or subscribe to the Early Expressions Piano blog
“Like” Early Expressions Preschool Piano on Facebook
Post about this giveaway on your blog or Facebook timeline!

Giveaway ends next Monday, April 16 at 11:59 pm (CDT). We will announce our two winners on Tuesday, April 17. Ready….enter!