Supporting home learning in music

The Normans Musical Instruments & Music Education Solutions Musical Learning Starter Pack

By Dr Elizabeth Stafford

As you will know if you read the first article in this magazine, even I as a primary music specialist have initially struggled with home school music lessons! This got me to thinking—how would ‘non-musical’ parents help their children learn music at home?

There’s not just the question of knowledge and skill, but also equipment. Even if online learning is an option, for primary aged children they still need to develop their physical instrumental playing in order to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum.

Then, I had a brainwave! What if we at Music Education Solutions could combine our expertise in curriculum design, with some quality instrumental resources from Normans Musical Instruments? Fortunately the lovely people at Normans thought this was a genius idea too, and so the Musical Learning Starter Pack was born!

The pack includes 9 high-quality percussion instruments suitable for use from early years to KS2. Alongside these we have created activity packs based around the interrelated dimensions of music from the National Curriculum.

Each set of progressive activities takes the child from understanding the dimension, through applying it to their playing, and finally using this knowledge creatively in composition. In order to make these activities as easy to understand as possible, I roped in my daughter Isla to help me create video demonstrations to accompany each activity—which was a really fun lockdown mother-daughter project!

These packs are already on sale from the Normans Musical Instruments website, and we’re looking forward to seeing how they are received by parents and children alike!