Have you ever asked your child to move faster, slow down, walk, run, or hurry up? By doing so, you are giving your child experience with tempo. Just as music has tempo (or speed), we experience tempo in just about everything we do. We play a lot with tempo in our Kindermusik classroom, not only because tiptoeing, running, walking, crawling, and creeping are fun, but also because it helps young children feel varying tempi through movement, long before they can express an understanding of tempo verbally.
Music has a variety of terms to describe tempo, or the speed of the music…accelerando (going faster), presto (very fast), adagio (quite slow), moderato (moderate). Your Our Time toddler music class student won’t be learning these terms per se; however he will be experiencing them in every class! Because our little ones are instinctively interested in fast and slow (mostly fast!), Kindermusik capitalizes on that interest and provides a multi-sensory experience that looks something like this: The child moves himself both
fast and slow to the music, sees others moving fast and slow, hears music that is both fast and slow, and has opportunity to experience playing an instrument both fast and slow. In other words, he is fully engaged.
Your child will do many activities in the years to come that involve tempo. Did you know there is a tempo to running, swinging a golf club, a tennis racket, a baseball bat? There is a tempo in moving up and down the basketball court, the soccer field, the football field. There is tempo to speech, and of course, music. Your child’s Kindermusik classroom experiences with tempo translate later into valuable skills that cross into every area of your child’s life – music, sports, dance, gymnastics, art, drama, and more!
Compiled by Theresa Case, whose Kindermusik program at Piano Central Studios in Greenville, SC, is proudly among the top 1% of Kindermusik programs worldwide.
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