A Music Appreciation Curriculum for the Whole Homeschool Family

I was compensated for my time and provided with a copy of this curriculum for review purposes, but all opinions expressed are my own.

Music is one of those topics that many homeschool parents don't feel qualified to teach. Nevertheless, you can and should teach music appreciation in your homeschool!

It is true that children get many benefits when they learn to play an instrument, but music appreciation in and of itself equips kids with more creativity, improves emotional development, and reduces stress. Still, if you have very little exposure to music, it can be a daunting task to teach your children.

The new Music Appreciation Course from Beautiful Feet Books makes simplifies it!

Beautiful Feet Books Music Appreciation: A Family Study

Contents of Beautiful Feet Music Appreciation

Teacher's Guide
Book of Composers
Printable Resource Packet

You don't need a ton of materials for this music appreciation curriculum. The Teacher's Guide lays out each lesson for you complete with access to play lists that you can use to listen to selections during meals or other times you may not be actively using for schooling. Of course, some time should be spent just listening, but immersing the kids in each type of music will give them a stronger appreciation of the type.

Music Appreciation with videos appeal to visual learners.

But you don't just listen to the music. Beautiful Feet Books has also created a beautiful Book of Composers that provides background information for your lessons. It also has QR codes to access playlists for various composers or time periods.

So you read and listen, but you also notebook. The printable resource pack that accompanies Beautiful Feet Books Music Appreciation provides you with illustrations of instruments and composers as well as music journal pages where kids can write about the pieces they listen to and rate them. With these as well as other notebooking suggestions from the teacher's guide, a simple composition notebook can become a trip through musical history through your child's eyes.

Music appreciation through notebooking works for hands-on learners.

Having the Resource Pack as a printable PDF also allows you to print as many copies as you need for your kids which is a money saver! This is only one reason that Music Appreciation: A Family Study truly works for the whole family.

Beautiful Feet Music is for Everyone

The whole family can participate
Works well for a variety of learning types
Very little teacher preparation
Doesn't require large amounts of time
Includes a wide variety of music

As I mentioned above, you have the ability to print as many copies of the resource packet as your kids need, so everyone gets to participate! Older kids may not want to color, and may already know some of the information, but they can really focus on the music and the qualities of each piece in their notebook as well as expanding on some of the brief writing ideas.

Not only can the whole family enjoy music together, but Beautiful Feet Books Music Appreciation supports different types of learners. Obviously listening and discussing is great for the auditory learners. But the beautiful pictures in the Book of Composers as well as the Teacher's Guide and the music videos you can watch while listening will appeal to visual learners while creating a music notebook along with other hands-on activities from the Teacher's Guide like making your own instruments will satisfy the hands-on learners among us.

Making instruments is a great hands-on music appreciation activity.

Lessons as laid out in the teacher's manual with what to read, watch, listen to, and discuss as well as suggestions for notebooking and hands-on activities. You just scan the QR codes to access the playlist, print the pages (or print them before starting and pull from a file like I prefer to do), and gather anything for hands-on activities. Very open and go. We used simple composition books for notebooks, and the kids do all the cutting, pasting, and coloring.

Kids are free to express their opinions on various music.

Each lesson is intended to last a week, so the entire curriculum could last 2 school years or just over a single year if you go year round. Even with several parts to each lesson, it seems to take 30 minutes max a day, and that is including hands-on activities. The teacher's guide also lists suggested books for rabbit trails if you have particularly interested kids. In fact, this is going to be a great addition for our morning time this upcoming year!

Beautiful Feet Books Music Appreciation features lessons to be used throughout the week.

Beautiful Feet Books Music Appreciation includes a wide variety of music that progresses from the very beginnings of music (as we know them) to today. It is very thorough in the exploration of music, instruments, and composers. So often it seems music appreciation is concentrated on a very few well known composers when there is so much more especially as music evolves to the current era.

Family Music Appreciation Course

While all Beautiful Feet Books curriculum can be used by multiple ages, this is truly a whole family curriculum which is actually great for families with wide age ranges.

Having everyone working from a single curriculum is a great way to save time since you can work with all your kids at once.

Plus, it can be hard to find common ground between high school ages and elementary ages, but having a shared experience is an effective way to enhance family bonding. So perhaps, your kids will not only benefit from Music Appreciation, but also from improved family relationships.