Goss Homeschool Academy

I'm so glad we are preparing for another Young People's Concert this month!  They are the highlight of our school year and Nashville Symphony always does an excellent job!  You can find their lesson plans on the website , and I also love to share my ideas of how I prepare my own kids for each musical selection with this blog! (No affiliation, just music teacher musings!) This month, the theme is "Symphony in Space" and our wonderful conductor of the Young People's Concerts will be weaving musical concepts throughout the concepts of a solar system.  I have an idea that maybe the "planets" will have to do with musical concepts?!  The lesson plans given work through instrumentation, rhythm and tempo, and dynamics and many of these pieces work very well in allowing students to experience these concepts through active listening. Giuseppe Verdi - Overture to La forza del destino The first number on the program is a great example to highlight the fami...

I recently was posting in a Charlotte Mason group about how much I love listening maps! Although they are not necessary for the enjoyment of classical music, they can be a wonderful tool of allowing your brain to pick up on "timbre" within the piece. If you're not familiar with the term "timbre" let me give you a quick music lesson! I'll start with a question - when you would pick up the phone as a teenager did the person on the end of the phone ever confuse your voice for another member of your family? That sound quality of your voice is unique, but because you belong to a family you develop similar characteristics to the other people under your roof! Kids these days might not ever experience that phenomenon because of the predominant use of cell phones! Maybe a better example for moms reading this post is when you say "is that my kid calling?" when you hear the loud shout of "MOMMY" from across the playground! To put it sim...