The online coursework prepares you to take children through the foundational level of music learning. Sound has to come before syllables, and syllables have to come before symbols. Bringing children through the foundational level assures extended immersion in the various meters and tonalities, and substantial interactivity through Rhythm Dialogue, Resting Tone Activities, Macro/Micro Beat Activities, and Tonal Dialogue. Children who have reached this level of experience are ready to move to rhythm and tonal syllables. Children as young as two years, with extensive experience in immersion and interactivity, can be ready for syllables.

Rhythm and tonal syllables provide a language for the musical mind that the thinking mind can understand, one that ultimately serves music reading. The power of syllables on the musical mind and how they facilitate music reading is hard to imagine until you have experienced them with children. Our thinking minds may understand the syllables themselves, but cannot comprehend the musical mind’s need for syllables, and their importance in music reading, just as the musical mind cannot comprehend the thinking mind’s need for logic.

Too often our thinking minds want to dominate, tempting us to try a music reading activity with children at the foundational level, and concluding that “they are reading music,” when it is the thinking mind rather than the musical mind that we have engaged. Taking children into notation before they are familiar with rhythm and tonal syllables does not serve the musical mind, nor does it make one a better teacher for “doing music reading” in the early childhood music classroom. Just as language interrupts the musical mind, notation interrupts the musical mind. Syllables adhere to the musings of the musical mind rather than interrupting. They not only provide concrete language for the musical mind, but a language that enables the musical mind to make sense of notation—bringing a sense of meter and tonality to notation and discovering the visual representation of what the musical mind knows that it knows in sound, through syllables.

Children who have come through the foundational level and fully ingested rhythm and tonal syllables are ready for shifting meters and shifting tonalities—shifting from one meter to another with successive meters and one tonality to another with successive tonalities. The syllables themselves not only identify each meter and each tonality, but enable children to compare and contrast meters and compare and contrast tonalities, through the syllables, which represent the knowing of the musical mind. These advanced children are ready for “Discrimination Activities,” which lead them to apprehend differences between meters and between tonalities, yet sameness across meters and across tonalities. Very young children who have come through the foundational level of music learning, who have also had substantial experience with rhythm and tonal syllables, and with Discrimination Activities, can then very naturally engage with music reading much as they do with language.

Sound, Syllables, Symbols provide the framework for music learning. As you become skilled teaching at the foundational level, and your children become competent at that level, both you and the children will be ready to move on to rhythm and tonal syllables, which are addressed in full in the online course entitled, “I Got Rhythm………and Tonal Syllables,” a ten week course to engage in with your children. The course will immerse you as well as the children in rhythm and tonal syllables, and stimulate interactivity with syllables. Once you witness the power of rhythm and tonal syllables with children and in your own musical mind, you and the children will be ready to explore music reading.