Let’s Play Music: Our Favorite Music Program
Let’s Play Music is a music education program for children whose mission is to build, teach, inspire, and enrich. This is a music program I am intimately familiar with as my oldest child has gone through it and my youngest is in it now.
If you prefer listening, we share all about Let’s Play Music on our Coop Faves Podcast
Let’s Play Music is a franchised music curriculum for early childhood. Teachers throughout the country become trained in the program and then manage their own offering of classes out of their homes or rented studio spaces.
About Let’s Play Music
Let’s Play Music was founded by Shelle Soelberg who has a BA in Music Education and was teaching private voice and piano instruction. In 1998 she was looking for a music class for her 3 and 1-year-olds and wanted more. She developed this program that incorporated the teaching philosophies of early music educators: Curwen, Kodaly, Orff, and Dalcroze.
The Let’s Play Music is a 3-year program designed to begin at age 4 or 5 which incorporates solfege, ear training, piano skills, note reading, and classical music study in a playful class setting. Let’s Play Music is broken into 6 semesters following the typical school year calendar. The end of each year culminates in a performance allowing students and families to celebrate the accomplishments of students in all 3 years. By the end of year 3, students compose and perform their own short song on piano.
In 2012, the Sound Beginnings program was created for 1.5-4 year olds and their care-giver. There are now 6 semesters of Sound Beginnings allowing children to attend for 3 years before repeating a semester. My daughter went through 1 year of Sound Beginnings before moving into Let’s Play Music. My son is in his second year of Sound Beginnings and will start Let’s Play Music next school year. In 2015, the Presto program was developed for older children beginning their music education.
I love that this program continues to grow, improve, and add more to encourage music education for young ages. I highly recommend reading about Let’s Play Music’s Core Values.
3 Reasons Why Let’s Play Music is a Favorite
There’s no wasted time during class. The teachers are trained to keep the class fun, productive, and constantly moving. Even the squirreliest students manage to stay focused because they don’t do any one thing long enough to get distracted.
The semesters have fun names and carry a theme throughout the semester. Our current Sound Beginnings semester is called White Horses and it includes folk songs about horses, counting practice, and introductions to classical music. All the semesters share a few songs that are the same for familiarity, routine, and ear training.
Learning is through PLAY. I truly believe that early childhood education should be rooted in play, and Let’s Play Music does it beautifully for such a comprehensive program. From the earliest ages, children learn to control their voices through echoing fun puppets, explore rhythm instruments, get to move freely with fun props, and learn thematic dances and puppet shows to understand classical music composition (a puppet or dance move is connected to specific melody lines, instruments or sections of music and come back at repeats or are used with another when melodies collide. It’s brilliant for recognizing patterns in music and helps them remember famous classical music that we inevitably encounter throughout our lives.
How We Incorporate Let’s Play Music
Having gone through the program once with my oldest, I still love and rave about this program and now have my 5-year-old in it. When my daughter graduated at 7, we were recommended to a private piano instructor through her Let’s Play Music teacher. It was a perfect match and my daughter was easily assessed by her piano teacher and started in the appropriate technique and theory books. The skills my daughter learned in the program easily translated to piano lessons, helping her musicality and deep connection to music. My daughter was definitely ready to move from group lessons to private by her 3rd year. So, I may have my son start his private piano lessons while he finishes his 3rd year if he seems the same.
Overall, I have nothing but amazing things to say about Let’s Play Music and recommend it to everyone I know. I hope that this helps inspire you to add music education to your life and see if Let’s Play Music is a good fit for you.
