Are you faced with the daunting task of running your very first toddler music lesson?

Never fear, this music lesson plan works. Let me hold your hand for a while and pretty soon you’ll be planning your own sessions and loving how well they run, even with the inevitable surprises. The lesson is called We Play Music. You can find all the music tracks and activity suggestions on the We Play Music lesson plan page.

But first things first. You’re going to need some resources.  Here’s the list:

1. Great Speakers and a Media Player

A media player e.g CD player, iPod and speakers or interactive whiteboard with the best speakers you can afford. (Small note – I use my iPhone in a light-weight portable speaker dock after I dropped my CD player while walking my trolley of instruments in to a child care centre in the middle of the city on a rainy day.  The kind lady in her late sixties who helped me get my load back together said, “Where’s your iPod?” which kicked me into the times!  So now I have hundreds of Musical Child tracks as mp3s on my phone and I can instantly access all my Playlists, no matter what the situation.)

2. Sets of Child-friendly instruments

The Instruments for this lesson, We Play Music, are bells, tapping sticks, castanets and drums, enough for one each per child.  If you can’t provide one drum each, such as these small fired clay drums, you could use a few large gathering drums with several children per drum. or home-made icecream container drums, or substitute another small percussion instrument such as shakers.

1. 

   coloured scarves

3. Just Add Colour and Movement!

Coloured scarves, balls or hoops for the music appreciation activity and hobby-horses or once again scarves for the drama and movement activity.

 

4. Drama Props – Be a Horse

Hobby horses are very engaging but if you can’t afford them or don’t have the storage, you can tuck your coloured scarves into your clothing to make a convincing horsie tail and most of the time, everyone is perfectly happy.

 

5. Books, Beautiful Books

You need illustrated Nursery rhyme picture books for the story songs, Baa Baa Black Sheep and Little Miss Muffett, at the end of the lesson.

6. Room to Move

Next, you need to organise a clear space with room for the children to sit comfortably in a circle for active work, move around like horses, dance freely, stretch out to rest and sit in front of you for story-time.  A carpeted area is best for seated and lying down activities but for whole body work you can make do by dancing around tables on a hard floor if you have no other choice.  Chairs should be stacked away.

7. Prepare Yourself

The major preparation work for the group leader is in learning how to sing the songs.  You can cheat for a while by having lyric charts on your wall or whiteboard but the way to keep a child fascinated is by singing all the lyrics to a song confidently.  In this lesson you’ll be substituting your children’s name into the song so you’d better practise that! I recommend that you use backing tracks, not the track with vocals, so the children hear your voice as the live music in their day.  This is vitally important.

There are 14 short songs you need to sing for We Play Music.  They are mostly traditional kids’ songs. But if you don’t know how a song goes, click this link to the We Play Music page, scroll down to the bottom of the page and listen to the previews there.

However, you can save yourself hours of preparation time  – simply buy the Lesson Plan We Play Music and make your life easier. Click here We Play Music

Here’s the list of song tracks you get (vocal tracks and backing tracks)

1. Hello Song
2. Pack Away Song
3. A Ram Sam Sam
4. Fingers Creeping
5. Ruby Goes High
6. Eency Weency Spider
7. This is the Way We Play
8. Horsie, Horsie
9. Little Red Caboose
10. Six Little Ducks
11. Charlie Over the Water
12. Baa Baa Black Sheep
13. Little Miss Muffett
14. Goodbye Song.

Find out more We Play Music