A Homeschool Music Curriculum can be a Wonderful Addition to Your Homeschool
Providing a child with the gift of a musical education starts them out on a path that will enrich their lives in so many ways! Bring music learning into your homeschool curriculum with Hoffman Academy’s comprehensive program and watch your child’s music skills blossom.
Why a Homeschool Music Curriculum Should Be Part of Any Educational Program
Here at Hoffman Academy, we think music can be a part of every educational program! Learning music empowers students to do far more than play songs on the piano. Not only does it encourage creativity and provide fun experiences, learning music develops important skills like time management, mental focus, and good practicing habits. Studies (like this one of over 100,000 high school students), have shown that children who are involved in music have significantly higher grades across all academic subjects. Besides, learning is simply more joyful when there’s music involved!
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Using a Homeschool Music Curriculum To Enrich Other Subjects
Learning to sing or play an instrument is great, but did you know that music can be part of learning other subjects too?
Music in Social Studies
Want a fun history and language arts project? Use one of Hoffman Academy’s music history blog posts as a jumping-off point and have your child create a research presentation on a musician or composer. For example, you could have them put together a digital slideshow including some information about the person, links to some of the songs they performed or composed, some pictures of where they lived, and maybe some major historical events that happened during their lives.
Music in Science
For some science fun with music, try these experiments in Chrome Music Lab:
- Spectrogram: This awesome visualization breaks a sound into its different frequencies. Turn on your computer’s microphone and try singing a note. Do you see the big peak near the bottom? That’s the note you’re actually singing. All those smaller peaks higher up on the screen are the overtones, which are other higher frequencies that resonate when you sing a note. What happens when you sing through your nose? Or try playing a note on the piano? What differences in the sound spectrum do you see? Have fun trying lots of different sounds.
- Sound Waves: Want to see how sound travels through the air? In this experiment, each dot on the screen represents an air molecule. When you hit a key on the piano, you can see how the molecules push and pull as the sound wave passes by. Can you see a difference in the way the air moves when you hit a low note and when you hit a high note?
Music in Math
When Mr. Hoffman teaches rhythm for a new song, students experience concepts like division and duration. Additionally, Chrome Music Lab also has a great demonstration that links fractions and music:
- Strings: Understand how simple mathematical ratios make up notes in the musical scale with this fun experiment. Click the parts of the strings and see how they sound. If the undivided string on the left is DO, can you find MI, FA, and SO? What fraction of the length of the DO string are they? (Answers: MI ⅘, FA ¾, SO ⅔, and bonus points if you found DO an octave up at ½.)
Adding a Homeschool Piano Curriculum with Online Lessons
With Hoffman Academy, you can make music appreciation, music theory, and the joy of learning piano a part of your homeschool music curriculum without leaving home!
Our fully-developed piano curriculum makes it easy for you to add piano to your homeschool. Every lesson has been carefully designed with early child development and learning theory in mind. Mr. Hoffman’s engaging, multi-sensory teaching method taps into natural curiosity and creativity to inspire musical exploration. Your child will love becoming a well-rounded musician with Mr. Hoffman! Kids start playing music by ear to build a strong foundation of musical understanding, and then quickly progress to understand music theory, learn to improvise, read sheet music & rhythms, and more!
We Even Offer Free Homeschool Piano Lessons
All of our video lessons are 100% free for anyone to use, but we also have a Premium subscription that includes sheet music, practice sessions, theory pages, access to online learning games, and more. With the customized practice sessions included in Hoffman Academy Premium membership, your homeschool student will have a clear understanding of what to practice every day. These practice sessions are designed to balance learning new material with reviewing old material. Continuous review empowers students to move confidently to each new level and meet the challenges of more advanced music.
Our practice sessions also include a variety of activities to make sure that students are developing all their important music skills like sight reading, ear training, finger exercises, transposing, improvising, composing, and more. And, with all of our extra music theory workbooks, assignment pages, and games, you’ll have plenty of fun and educational resources you can use to customize and add to the learning experience of your homeschool music curriculum.
How Long Will a Homeschool Music Curriculum Take?
Hoffman Academy music learning can easily fit into around 30 minutes of study time each day. Here’s how a homeschool music curriculum can work:
- Two or three times a week, watch a 10-20 minute video lesson.
- Every day, practice for around 15 minutes. Students should spend one or two days of practice before they move on to the next video lesson.
- As students progress to more advanced units, practice time can gradually increase to 20 or 30 minutes a day.
- Hoffman Academy offers 300+ video lessons with more being made all the time, enough material to keep students learning piano for years.
The Benefits of Learning with Music with a Homeschool Music Curriculum
Music study helps build many positive skills. It’s a complex language that teaches the brain to coordinate sight, sound, movement, and timing. A student who is learning with a homeschool music curriculum gains first hand experience with the power that practice has to make what once seemed impossible into something fun and easy, giving them the confidence to tackle anything they dream of doing. But one of the best things about music is the positive relationships it can create. Making and sharing music together unites families and communities and makes the world a better place. We hope you’ll join us.
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