A day in the life of a Kindermusik teacher

Kindermusik lessons for new borns to children aged four, provides fun, music and movement activities to foster brain development in babies and young children, while helping them bond with parents.

This is a new venture for Irene who trained as an accountant with a Queen’s Degree in Business Studies. However when her first child came she left work and become a full time carer for her baby. That is when she decided to teach piano, theory and singing a few times a week. That was over 20 years ago and she is still doing it

The mum of three and grandmother of two young babies is also well known for her personal training business Impact Fitness.

In all our classes we start with our hello song, perhaps adding some ‘solfa’ and hand signs for the benefit of the caregivers.

This month we are concentrating on opposites, up and down, quiet and loud, open and close and also learning the sign language for these concepts. For example our babies class called Cuddle and Bounce, are learning the concept of up and down through nursery rhymes.

For our Hickory, Dickory Dock song, the pitch of our voices goes up when saying the ‘Mouse Ran Up the Clock’ and we also swoop baby up. Then we do the opposite for ‘down’, in the ‘Mouse ran down’ and we bring baby down again. The action of our voice and the movement ‘up’ clues baby into the meaning for the words she is hearing.

We also incorporated tummy time for babies with music and toys; this gets baby ready for the more complex movement of crawling.

For every class we include circle dancing, story reading for the older child, instrument play and listening time. The 45 minutes goes very quickly moving from one activity to another. In all there are 12 different activities for every class.

It is a very uplifting experience seeing young children and babies respond instinctively to music. They are able to swoop and fly like birds become ballet dancers, anything that their imagination allows. I am learning alot from them. When we pass out instruments I ask the caregivers to follow the children’s playing rather than show them how to play. The different way of playing coming from the children is exciting to watch. For more details about class times check out the Facebook page ‘Kindermusik with Ms Renee’.