NOTICE: If you are looking for
Mommy and Me Classes in Beacon for your baby or toddler, see our
Kids Classes Guide here at A Little Beacon Blog! It has over 50 classes from Beacon to Poughkeepsie. The music teacher featured below is included in that lineup!
UPDATE: Juliana continues to offer Music Together, as well as her own program at
Juliana's Music Box.
I was introduced to the
Music Together program by my babysitter who had gone through the classes with another family she sat for in Boston, MA, and she loved it. I'd heard of moms taking music classes early on with their babies when I lived in Manhattan, so I was ready to sign up.
Music Together is a franchised music program for babies, toddlers and kids, that is a "research-based, developmentally appropriate early childhood music curriculum that strongly emphasizes and facilitates adult involvement," according to their description on their website. The teachers who teach it have invested in it as their business, and the one
local to Beacon is Juliana's Music Together. Each class semester is based around one of the
nine music collections Music Together has produced, and the only way that you can buy the CD is by taking a class. Each collection is based around a special instrument. With your registration, you get a CD of the collection, and a song book with notes in case you wanted to play on the piano or guitar. Juliana brings loads of instruments and other props to interact with each song, and there is never a dull moment.
After listening to the first CD we got (over and over and over), I can tell you that these songs are special. Ruby listens to them for breakfast, on road trips, and during emergency stroller meltdowns. She knows that they live in my iPhone, and now at 15months, will let me know she wants to listen to the songs by doing a version of singing "bababa" and pointing to the music-making phone. If we only sing the first "Hello..." from the first greeting song that is on every album, Ruby starts swaying her hips.
Juliana has
classes all during the year, and they include all ages. Ruby started at 7 months, and was enthralled with the older kids, and with Julianna herself, as she is animated and expressionate during her teachings of rhythm to the parents, and while singing and dancing. It's really neat bringing Ruby as she grows, as she couldn't crawl at the beginning of her first semester, and by the end, was crawling. During the next set of classes, Ruby was going through the walking stage. When we sign up for this fall semester, Ruby is running, and I wonder how she will interact with the other kids, how she will get her own instruments, and how the scarf games will be different.
