Kids Music Company’s Weblog

I am having a wonderful week. I have done several workshops with children and still have a few to go. My week has filled up very quickly. The kids over here are so cute. Basically there are beautiful kids wherever I go in Australia. It’s such a joy to see smiling faces of little people as they pretend to be Mrs. Bunny, or Mr. Teddy, or as they wriggle and jiggle their way around the room.
I’ve also enjoyed meeting teachers and assistants at childcare centres and kinders (or kindy’s as they are called in the West). The welcome has been warm, and I will be glad to come back one day.

Finally, the new website is up and running. You may notice that I have the teaching material for one of our songs. It’s the tightrope song, and is a fabulous piece for helping children to be able to practice their balance and help to develop body awareness.
Each of our cd’s have an accompanying book that provides the main purposeand learning outcomes including musical outcomes and cross curricular outcomes. It also has notes that teach the songs step by step. I always found it great to have the learning outcomes already there for me when I was teaching in Kinder.
Do you have children in your class or at home that have poor body awareness and/or poor spacial awareness? You can tell through a number of different ways. They may walk over other children instead of walking around them. They will bump into others when doing a group activity. When they draw a picture of themselves, they are most likely to draw their head with arms and legs coming out of the head - no body.
One way to help children become aware of their bodies, and of the space around them, is to do lots of songs that include moving around the room in many different ways including walking, running, skipping, stomping, jumping and hopping.
Until next time, keep singing

On Saturday I will be flying to Perth for music workshops. I will be away until Sunday week, and am looking forward to meeting teachers from over there.
If anyone reading this is from Perth, please consider coming to one of the workshops. They are a lot of fun.

It’s finally up and running. What a relief. My new website went live at midnight last night.
I am very grateful to my son, Steve, for all the hard work he put into the site.
Now I feel that I can relax a bit.

I have been given the priviledge of being Clayton’s guest on One on One this coming Monday between 11am and 12 noon.
I thought it would be scarey talking on the radio, but when we recorded the interview on friday, I found that it was quite fun. Clayton is great at asking the right questions, so I didn’t feel uncomfortable, or that I really had to think hard to get the right answers.
I hope to put the interview up on my blog after the event (if I can work out how to do it).

I have been so busy over the past couple of months that I have been very slack in doing my blog. This weekend we are hoping to have the new website up and running. It has been long overdue. My son Steve has been working on it on and off since February.
It’s been a bit hard as he move to Broken Hill in March. I went up to see him last week and we spent all saturday afternoon and evening working on the new site. It was a very good feeling.

Keep checking because it’s coming very, very soon.

January has turned into a bit of a blur for me. I am on the VOSA committee. This is the Victorian Orff Schulwerk Association, and we had a massive conference running from sunday 6th January until friday 11th January.

It was a fantastic conference, with lots of wonderful feedback. I was “house mum” to about 18 people. We were staying at a camp site about 10 minutes drive from the conference which was held in Mt. Eliza at Toorak College. I enjoyed making sure that everyone felt at home. I hope I succeeded. Everyone staying at the camp site were teachers, and I really enjoyed spending time with them in the evenings after the conference was over for the day. One night we had campfire singing, although we weren’t around a camp fire. Another evening we had a competition answering questions. It was lots of light hearted fun.

The actual conference was run for teachers of preschoolers, primary school, high school and studio classes. We had world class presenters who were very inspiring. We learnt body percussion from Keith Terry (from the USA), dance from Andrea Ostinag (Austria), Pizza making from Rodrigo (in a musical form of course), and some singing from Christoph Maubach (Melbourne)

Since the conference finished, I have been trying to get my head around MYOB. It has been frustrating, but challenging. I haven’t really been concentrating on anything else - including writing my blog. You see, I have just taken over Kids Music Company in Australia and the business is run in MYOB. I am sure that I will be glad one day that it is like this, but at the moment, my head is spinning.

On top of this, I have my son’s 21st party tomorrow evening, so I have been cooking as well.

Next week I am off to Tasmania for a conference. That will be fun for sure.

Today I start back teaching the children at my music school and I can hardly wait to see them all again.

I’m starting a new class today for the older children. I was teaching 1 to 6 year olds, but couldn’t bear to stop teaching the older children.  So, now I am going to teach the 7 year olds the recorder and piano, and keep teaching them the xylophone which they have been doing for the past two years. I hope that they will be as enthusiastic as I am feeling.

From January 6th to the 11th, the Victorian Orff Schulwerk Assosiation is holding a wonderful music conference. It is being held at Toorak College, Old Mornington Rd, Mt Eliza,

Melways Map 101 G10 If you would like to know more, go to http://www.vosa.org/

You can come as a day visitor, or for the whole 6 days. We have international presenters as well as Aussie presenters. We are catering for early childhood, primary, secondary and studio teachers. There is still time for you to book in and attend.

I will be there. I am presenting on the Monday along with Wendy Jensen who is flying in from New Zealand. We will have our books and cd’s for sale during the conference.

Do you need to find a Christmas present for your young children? Kids Music Company has a whole range of fantastic cd’s for kids from 1 up to 12. We have a Marimba book and cd which would be fabulous for 9 to 12 year olds, two recorder cd’s and accompanying books, and a large range of fantastic cd’s with original award winning  songs for children from 1 up to 8.

Anyone who mentions this blog and my name when ordering up until Christmas, will get a 10% discount on sales.