Ukulele Lesson in Preschool One

Following the childrens interest in music, I brought in my Ukulele from home, teaching the 3 and 4 year olds the chords and strum to "Hush little Baby".
But first we started our Ukulele Lesson by talking about notes and tunes. I showed them a songbook and asked what are the black dots with the lines are called, Anita and Lauren answered in a chorus "notes", everyone else agreed. So we started to talk about notes and about that every note has a different sound. Then it was time to listen to some sounds and tell what tune it is. I got out my guitar/bass tuner and asked every child to say something into it and then to tell me what letter it showed on the side. We found out that most children talked in a G tune.
Then we finally started to tune the Ukulele and I played "Twinkle, twinkle little star" which we quickly found out had the same melody as the "Alphabet Song" and "Bah, bah black sheep". To make sure that it really had the same notes throughout the whole song we decided to sing all three songs like a canon at the same time. Taylor, Ava, Eve and Patrick sang “ABC”, Sarah, Joy and Cameron sang “bah, bah” and Nadja, Lauren, Anita and Sam sang “twinkle, twinkle”. We really had to concentrate to keep singing our songs but it was lots of fun.

Then finally everybody got a turn to play the Ukulele. I showed them how to hold the F chord and the C7 chord; it was a bit tricky especially changing the chords in the middle of the song so I helped a little and everyone done a great job. Watch and listen yourself:

Anita

Ava

Cameron

Eve

Joy

Lauren

Nadja

Patrick

Sam

Sarah

Taylor


"By playing an instrument children explore sounds and will be able to improvise them. They will be able to distinguish between different kinds of instrumental sounds and imitate simple melodic patterns.

When children learn an instrument they will be able to associate symbols with sounds, using pictorial, graphic, and basic conventional notation." - Music Education for young children, MoE 1993