Good Night, Trebellina

For a few months now, we have been watching a wonderful DVD called Trebellina which introduces a baby to music, notes, pitch, and rhythm. It has done wonders for TJs sense of pitch. There is a wonderful segment which introduces a number of percussion instruments. I have to say, my favorite is the cowbell, but TJ seems to be partial to the tambourine over the others.

Save your money on Kindermusik class if you don't want to be bothered. We enjoyed Kindermusik because TJ is just really a social butterfly and being around babies and kids is his favorite thing, but it was not worth the money. We get the same affect going to the indoor park at the mall. I was also tired of the other parents only wanting to talk to me about TJ's hair. The only thing I took from the class was the "Toys Away" song, which after my singing it every day for about a month, TJ began to say "Thank you." Kindermusik is a social hour, and if you can't find a nice play group or just want to talk to other parents and see other babies, Kindermusik is a good option. Moms, especially stay at home moms, just need to get out of the house and talk to other adults some time, so I don't want to discourage Kindermusik or Music Together or Baby Maestro. But if your goal is for your baby to eventually start music education, this is not specific preparation for that at all.

Spend only $20 or so on this video, and your baby will actually be on his way to developing a fine-tuned musical ear, a singing voice, perfect pitch, a sense of rhythm and fluency in reading music. He will dance, clap, hear classical music, and be exposed to the keyboard and musical staff, the Treble clef (hence the name of the animated music teacher). This is actually the goal of music education, not knowing a few nice tunes or banging on random instruments with no instruction on how to create something other than noise.

Like I said in the previous post, we will continue to try to squeeze this video in a couple of times a week to make room for Your Baby Can Read. The DVD allows you to play only the animated music lessons, or only the live movie clips as you wish. The run time on the entire DVD is 32 minutes I believe, so if you play only certain parts you can get your music lesson in in less than 15 minutes.

I will post more on Trebellina and my baby's music education later.