Let’s Play Music, an innovative music educational company that builds, teaches, inspires, and enriches lives through the power of music, has launched an online platform for its foundational music class for children from four to six. As a part of this initiative, the platform will allow students that live far from a licensed Let’s Play Music teacher to enrol in the three-year program that begins teaching Music at a young age through play, incorporating music theory, piano technique, classical Music, and ear training.
Let’s Play Music operates under the philosophy that, to be most effective, music education should begin as early as possible, typically at the ages of four or five, in live classrooms with around seven or eight students. Classes are usually conducted at a licensed teacher’s private or commercial music studio.
Founded by Shelle Soelberg in 1998, Let’s Play Music created videos of the entire three-year curriculum, composed of 30 weekly lessons per year, for a total of 90. These were designed as an interactive learning model for one child at home, with guidance from a parent or adult guardian who lives more than 30 miles from the nearest Let’s Play Music teacher. Each video is 30 minutes long and is supplemented with a 15-minute live online call with a certified teacher, ensuring that the student can understand the concepts and absorb the skills correctly. The online program also includes all the needed learning materials in a kit shipped to the student’s residence each semester.
Speaking about the company, the Founder of Let’s Play Music, Shelle Soelberg, said:
While we believe that face-to-face classes are the best way to teach Music, we realized that it’s not always possible, especially with how big the US is. We’re always looking to certify more teachers in the Let’s Play Music method and make them accessible to every child. But, until that happens, we are offering the next best alternative by allowing children to access our program online.
The platform’s online classes are available only for its three-year flagship curriculum, but it also offers two other live programs for children of different ages. The Sound Beginnings program is for children four and below and a caregiver. It provides a solid preschool foundation for the main Let’s Play Music program using movement, instrument play, nursery rhymes, stories, ear training, singing, and solfege. There is the Presto program for kids seven to eight years old who missed the window to start its program, which adapts the only program for older children and compresses it to two years.
According to Soelberg, graduates of the Let’s Play Music and Presto programs can play the piano and quickly learn to play any other instrument. They also come out with a wide variety of musical skills and are able to compose their pieces of Music. The conventional music teaching programs have only 20% of students remaining after three years. Let’s Play Music inverts this statistic, boasting an 80% completion rate for its three-year program.
Let’s Play Music empowers its expert teachers with play-based curricula that develop talent, enhance intelligence, and deepen human connections. Students can read Music and know what the Music sounds like in their heads, so sight-singing, harmonizing, composing and improvising become second nature. The firm does this by taking advantage of the brain’s ability to absorb music concepts and teach skills age-appropriately.
Soelberg added:
Let’s Play Music is unique because we aim to capture the music learning window – when the child’s mind can absorb musical concepts – and we actually do something with it. Unlike other young children’s music programs, we implement sequential learning and intentionally build on previous ideas to allow students to grasp and play Music fully. It’s a very ordered curriculum that guarantees results.
