Mighty Musicians! (...plus a giveaway!!)

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.