The 10-week online course introduced you to many practices that need to be sustained in order to propel music learning. Theory in practice requires that you continue to use rhythm preps for rhythm activities, tonal preps for tonal activities, and rhythm and tonal preps for Art Songs and Gem Songs. It requires that you continue to use non-verbal communication, minimize all verbalization, speak on the resting tone to sustain tonality or in rhythm to sustain meter, and let the rhythm or tonal narrative dominate an activity rather than props or storylines. It requires that you reinforce meter or tonality as needed to keep the narrative prime, reinforce breath and tonguing, keep activities within the beginning singing range, do rhythm activities without tonal and include the simplest rhythm in tonal activities. It invites movement into all dimensions of music learning.
Additional practices in lesson planning and execution will propel audiation. Rotate meters and rotate tonalities so that your children will experience at least 4 meters and 4 tonalities within any given 4 week period, with at least 2 meters and 2 tonalities each week. Introduce more difficult rhythm and tonal content while continuing to reinforce easier content, giving children at every level the support they need. Alternate rhythm and tonal activities so that successive activities are not in two different meters or two different tonalities at these early stages. If you have to shift meters within a tonality, prep the new meter on the resting tone. If you have to shift keys within a tonality, prep the tonality in the new key and then reinforce the meter.
The more children develop musically, the longer they will attend to any given meter or tonality, and the more opportunity you will have to extend a meter or tonality through a variety of successive activities in that meter or tonality. You might choose to add an Art Song or Gem Song to further extend a tonality, and then perhaps break the musical intensity of the series of focused activities with a Play Song. You are learning to manipulate and sustain the attention of the musical mind much as the teacher of other subjects sustains the attention of the thinking mind, taking the musical imagination on endless journeys of enchantment.
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