Time for music class!

I took Kali 1.0 to her music class last night. We got there a few minutes early and played on the slide a few times. Kali's getting pretty good at the slide since her aunt sent her one to play with at home. She also got a big kick out of watching the other kids play with things in the room.

Miss Emily is her music class teacher. Kali's a big fan of Miss Emily. Kali got most of the attention last night from Miss Emily and the other parents in the group. The other kids in the class were between 3 and 4 years of age, so Kali drew everyone's interest. We started off with a song set to the tune of Frere Jacques. The group sang the same song for each kid in the group...........

Hello, Kali. Hello, Kali.
How are you? How are you?
Glad you came to music. Glad you came to music.
Thank you. Thank you.

During the whole song, everyone banged the mat in front of them to the beat. Kali was caught off-guard by all the banging initially, so I grabbed her hands and started showing her the motion. By the time they got to the last kid, Kali had finally caught on and was banging the mat while smiling at everyone else.

The 'theme' of the class was swing dancing. We started off by playing some swing music and waiving some colored scarves to the beat. Kali, as before, was more interested in watching everyone else than actually participating. Miss Emily noted that kids that are Kali's age learn quite a bit by watching, so it was perfectly fine if she just wanted to watch.

Next, we got some echo microphones to sing with. If you sing into them, your voice produces an echo effect that alters the sound. I started singing into it with the group. I offered the microphone to Kali after showing her how it worked, but she wanted none of it. She pushed away my microphone and crawled over to grab her own microphone that was sitting next to Miss Emily. Little Miss Independent! She put the microphone up to her mouth and made the same motion as everyone else. Miss Emily praised Kali and she was pretty excited about that.

Miss Emily then gave us all maracas to shake to the beat of another song. Kali stared at everyone for awhile, but eventually she started shaking the maracas and getting into it. Her only problem was when the song ended. I put the maracas back into the container and Kali started to crawl over to the container to retrieve them. She wanted to play some more!

We had a multi-colored elastic rope circle that Miss Emily put in front of the group. Everybody grabbed the rope and we bounced it to the music. Kali kept trying to grab on to the rope, but it was bouncing quite a bit. She was smiling even though she couldn't grab a hold of the rope. It doesn't take much to entertain a one year old kid.

Near the end of the class, Miss Emily brought out a couple of containers with all sorts of instruments. Kali jumped out of my lap and crawled over to the containers. She sorted through the instruments and picked out a few that she liked. She's big on the shaking instruments, though she did like to bang on the drum after seeing one of the kids do the same thing on their drum. Same problem here as with the maracas.......Kali obviously wasn't through when Miss Emily said the time was up. Kali didn't raise a fuss or anything, but you could tell that she was confused why they had to stop playing with the instruments.

We finished up with a slightly altered version of the original song........

Goodbye, Kali. Goodbye, Kali.
How are you? How are you?
Glad you came to music. Glad you came to music.
Thank you. Thank you.