65: 12 Easy Ways to Include Music in Your Homeschool

Are you a homeschooling parent looking for creative, practical, and simple ways to bring music education into your homeschool curriculum? In this episode of the “Music in Our Homeschool” podcast, veteran music teacher and homeschooling mom of eight, Gena Mayo, shares 12 easy, affordable, and fun ideas to include music in your homeschool, even if you have no musical background yourself!

Discover how easy it can be to read and sing nursery rhymes, enjoy background music throughout the day, and create homemade musical instruments with your kids. Gena explores the benefits of incorporating music games—like flashcards and bingo—to teach music theory concepts, as well as engaging with educational music apps for extra practice.

Want more structure? Learn how virtual music lessons can fit seamlessly into your routine. Gena also highlights the importance of ear training, recognizing animal and instrument sounds, and taking advantage of local musical field trips to ignite your child’s passion for music.

If you follow a Charlotte Mason homeschool approach, don’t miss Gena's tips on composer study, hymn study, folk songs, and reading living books about music and famous composers. She even suggests ways to add music to a homeschool co-op, whether through group classes, choir, or bucket drumming.

Packed with actionable advice, book recommendations, and inspiration, this episode will help you confidently add music to your homeschool—regardless of your musical expertise. Whether you’re just starting your homeschooling journey or looking to level up your music curriculum, this podcast has something for everyone.

Ready to enrich your homeschool days with the joy of music? Listen now and check out musicinourhomeschool.com for more resources, courses, and ideas!

Find links to all resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/easy-ways-music-in-your-homeschool/ 

Please follow/subscribe to the podcast and leave a 5-star review and comment if you liked this episode! Find all courses at https://Learn.MusicinOurHomeschool.com ,free music lessons here: https://MusicinOurHomeschool.com/FreeMusicLessons , and lots more links here: https://linktr.ee/genamayo !

Transcript

65: 12 Easy Ways to Include Music in Your Homeschool

[00:00:00] Hi, my name is Gena Mayo from Music in our Homeschool, and my purpose is to help you include music in your homeschool. You can check out MusicinOurHomeschool.com for all kinds of resources and ideas, but today I want you to find some easy ways to include music in your homeschool. 

Now, usually when a person is thinking about doing music, they will think, "What curriculum am I going to buy?" Am I going to do something like this? B uy a full curriculum like this and do all the pages, and read all of the books that they recommend and listen to the CDs. And that's one way you can do it. But there are so many more ideas, and some of them are super easy. You can fit 'em in in just a few minutes and I just want to inspire you today.

Let me get my list here and let's start at the beginning. One thing you will want to do, hopefully when you have little ones, [00:01:00] is start out by reading nursery rhymes. Just pick up some books at the library. So many fun nursery rhymes. Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. Bow Wow says the Dog and Oranges and Lemons and Polly Put the Kettle On.

So what I would do is I would read these books before my kids took a nap or before bed every night, to my little toddlers and preschoolers. And if it was a nursery rhyme that had a song like Hickory Dickory Dock, then I would sing it. But otherwise I'd just read it as a chant. And that really helped the kids get that poetry in their heads, in their minds, and understanding how the language works and learning a few songs and hearing those as well.

So nursery rhymes, number one. Super easy way to add some music to your homeschool. 

Number two is to simply play music in the background. There are so many different ways to create [00:02:00] playlists today. You can do it with Spotify or YouTube. So create a playlist that you like, or you can even find some that other people have made.

And use them for different purposes throughout the day. Maybe while your kids are working on their schoolwork, you put on a quiet study playlist. Maybe while they're doing chores, you put on some energizing fun music to give them some background music to do their sweeping and their dishes and cleaning their room.

If you are riding in the car, you might have some fun music for riding in the car, or here's an idea, flip it over to the classical station. Every once in a while listen to one piece or even just five minutes. So they're starting to hear some different types of music, maybe the jazz station. So they're hearing different styles.

You could put music on during bath time and right before their nap times [00:03:00] and while they're playing in their playroom doing Legos or Play-Doh. So there are ways to include music at lots of different times during the day in the background. 

Another really fun thing to do is to make some homemade instruments. You could make something like maracas. Just take an Easter egg and put some beans or rice. It's also really fun to put different things and different eggs, and then you could shake 'em and find the matches and hear how they sound different, if there's different amounts or different types. Put rocks and beads and macaroni and compare all the different sounds. So that's a really fun thing to do. 

Here is a really simple rain stick. I mean, you can't get more simple than this. It's just a toilet paper or a paper towel tube. We put something inside, maybe that was. Macaroni or rice, I can't tell. [00:04:00] And cover it. There's some really fancy ways to do rain sticks, so you can look up some tutorials, but simple works too.

And I do have a post on my website of some really fun musical instruments you can make such as slapsticks, pan flutes, sound jars, ankle bells, a jingle stick, a play guitar. So many different fun things that you can make for musical instruments. And then, turn on some music and play your instrument with it.

You might also want to purchase some musical instruments that are well made, not like my silly rainstick there such as a little jingle bell, little hand drums, or something like this that has actual pitches.[00:05:00] 

I have a set of chimes that were made from pipes. Those are really fun. I got those on Etsy. And, here's a neat instrument called a cabasa You can look for different types of instruments and then again, put on some music and play these instruments with it.  

You can play games. This is a really great way to learn some music, is to play some games. You can find books like this that have different music games in them different kinds of flashcards and you're learning different concepts. 

You can also find some games online, some downloadable ones, bingo cards. One of my most favorite types of games to do with my kids is using the bingo cards, and they either have instruments and so I'm playing an instrument sound and they have to recognize [00:06:00] the instrument on their card. Now it's a little bit advanced. It takes a while to build up your knowledge of how each instrument sounds, what it looks like and what it's called, but that's something you could build up to. 

Another fun thing to do is with musical symbols. So you have a treble clef and a quarter note and a crescendo sign and then they're learning what the symbols are called from music. And you can have those in flashcards, like memory cards or bingo. Lots of different things you can do to play games. 

There are some great apps. One of my favorite apps is called Flash Note Derby, and it's a horse race. You have to quickly identify the note on the staff. If it's in the second space of treble clef, you need to press A as fast as you can. So it trains you to go quicker. You can limit it to just on the staff, just one clef or broader, even up into ledger lines. So [00:07:00] that is a great game for different ages and different levels.

Virtual music lessons? Well, you know, things have changed so much in the last couple of years. There are many, many more music teachers that are able to teach virtually than ever before. They have found new, equipment, new hardware to make the sound work better. So it's possible now to get a really good education virtually if you find a good teacher. Now, it might be tricky, but even looking in your own area, finding a teacher that matches you and your student it's sometimes a little tricky to find the best, but you can do it for violin and voice and guitar and ukulele, and all kinds of instruments. So that is really a simple, easy way to add some music to your homeschool is to get an outside teacher to teach them. 

Another fun way to practice ear training, I [00:08:00] mentioned with the little sound jars or the eggs that you put different things in, but you also can do that with animal sounds. This is another one of my favorite things to do with my kids, is to show them cards. So this is a squirrel. A honeybee and a cricket, and so you're playing the animal sounds and maybe they have the cards laying out in front of them. You could just find pictures online or have the kids draw them, and you start teaching them what each sound is like, and then they can recognize it. 

I have learned so many different bird sounds now. It's really fun to hear the birds outside and now I know what a blue jay, a red wing blackbird, and a loon, and a Canada goose, and a robin, and a chickadee, I can distinguish them now because I have taught them to my kids and they can [00:09:00] recognize the different animal sounds as well. 

Then you'll move into instruments. You could just have some cards of instruments and teach the kids how to recognize the different instrument sounds. And by the way, you could find all the sounds you need on YouTube. So just search violin solo, or sound of chickadee, and then you can always find those sounds right there. 

A great thing to do for Beginning Voice when you're helping your kids learn how to use their voice is to have some drawings like this, and they learn how to make their voice do these things on the card, these different designs, like, ooh, or.

And so just draw some different designs like this, put them out in order, and [00:10:00] then the kids can change up the order, and then they're practicing doing different things with their singing voices. 

The next thing is to get out of the house and go on field trips, musical field trips. You can go to concerts. There are lots of kid concerts that we have attended that were actually made for children, choir or orchestra or band. Attend concerts at the local schools around your area, maybe a college nearby. Find an opera that would be appropriate for children that you could take them to. Musicals are great. Make sure again, that it's appropriate for younger ages. Check out what the themes are in that musical. 

And then there's other types of field trips you could do as well. Like one time we went on a field trip to the Lyric Opera in Chicago and we [00:11:00] got to go backstage and under the stage and into the dressing rooms, we saw where the wigs were made and where the singers would warm up. They have, some of the leads have private dressing rooms with pianos. They would warm up before they'd go out on stage, and that was fascinating. Oh, props, we got to see the costumes. It was really fun. So check out different field trips like that that you could do that are related to music. 

All right. If you are a Charlotte Mason homeschooler, there are some amazing things that she encouraged that have really inspired some wonderful materials. And some ideas, some easy ideas for adding music to your homeschool. One is composer study, so you just pick a composer maybe Aaron Copland, and you spend a whole month just listening to Aaron Copland's music. Or maybe it's Bach and you spend an entire [00:12:00] semester just listening to Bach's music and that gives you an opportunity to really hear that what that person's style was like.

And if you did that with Aaron Copland one semester and Bach the second, you would see, wow, they're really different. It's both classical music, but bach being in the Baroque period and Aaron Copland in the modern 20th century period. Very different styles, different types of music, even different instruments that they wrote for.

So that is a fun thing to do. Composer study. 

Another fun thing is to do hymn study. Learning different hymns. I think I have a booklet over here. So you can use something like this. Great hymns of the faith. And learn the hymns with your kids.

Maybe you even want to learn how to sing in four-part harmony. You could do that, or you're just learning the melody with your kids. [00:13:00] This particular booklet has the lyrics in the back as well. So hymn study is a great thing to do because not only are you learning. The hymns, but you're learning some doctrine and understanding how, maybe even how it relates to some church history.

Another thing Charlotte Mason encouraged was learning folk songs. And I love folk songs for many reasons. One is because usually they're very easy to sing. What's the definition of a folk song? Well, it's one that was written by someone who is not a professional musician. Maybe it was just a mom making up a song, a lullaby for her child. Maybe it was a, a man who made up a song, a love song for the woman that he was wooing. Or it was maybe parents made up a song about the history of an event in their culture that they're trying to teach to their [00:14:00] children. Or it was men that made up these songs that helped them as they were working on the railroads or mining or on the ships, sea shanties. So, so many great folk songs. 

We don't know the original composers of these because they were just passed down through the ages. They've spread out and changed. The words have changed. The melodies sometimes are different, but they're usually easy to sing and they're fun. I really encourage learning folk songs.

You can learn folk songs from other countries as well to learn more about their culture. And to learn other languages like Alouette from France or Cielito from Mexico. So many different types of songs that you could learn. 

And, of course Charlotte Mason also encouraged reading living books. So I have a bunch of book ideas that I would love to encourage [00:15:00] you to use.

Very, very simple way to add some music to your homeschool. And a lot of these can be found in your library. So this is one of my favorites. The Story of the Orchestra. It has a CD that comes with it and you are learning about different instruments and then it will show you here what you are supposed to play. Like that says play track 16. It also goes through the different style periods and the some like, here's the modern era and then it has different composers. From those different musical eras. So this is a great, great book. The Story of the Orchestra. 

I really like this one. Music Is, and it's hard for me to open because what it does is it like spreads all the way out. So it's kind of like, eh, it always falls when I'm trying to show it. But this one's really fun because it does different musical styles, [00:16:00] like even modern styles, reggae, and Latin music and jazz and rhythm and blues. See if I can hold it without it falling open. And then when you open it back the other direction, it gives you some examples. It also has a really fun rhyme to read as you are going through it. So this one's called Music Is. Love that book. 

And then of course there are so many wonderful composer books, biographies. Some of these are great because they, they talk about the composers when they're children. There's longer books as well. There's just simple short picture books, but there's also longer ones. And then this one here has a variety of different composers in it. Like, here's Frederic Chopin and Guiseppe Verdi. [00:17:00] This one's called Lives of the Musicians.

When you are learning folk songs with your kids, you can often find books that are written that have that folk song in it. It might have just one line or a couple lines on each page. This is Hush Little Baby. Don't say a word. Mama's gonna buy you a Mockingbird. Really cute book. 

Here's one for the Little Drummer Boy. I love this song, so you can see again how it just has a little bit of the song on each page. And a lot of times when I'm reading these, when I did read these to my kids when they were young, I would sing them while I was reading them and then they'd start singing back. Here's another really fun one. I love these books. There's also one for Yankee Doodle and some other songs, so great books. 

There are some simple books like this, well, that have simple songs in them that [00:18:00] you can learn. Most of these have audios with them. So if you're trying to learn some new songs, these Wee Sing books are great for that. 

You can also use books to actually learn some pieces. Every year, I'm amazed at all the wonderful new books that have been written. So here's one on Peter and the Wolf, which is a really fun piece to listen to because the orchestra music is written with narration and the characters in the story are represented by different instruments, like the bassoon is the grandfather and the bird is the flute. So that is a fun book to read while you're listening to it. 

But they have some books like that for Carnival of the Animals and Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, so, so many fun ones. 

Another really fun thing to do is to dance in your homeschool, so just turn on some fun dancing music. [00:19:00] Maybe at Christmas time it will be something from the Nutcracker Ballet or if you are learning to march, you might wanna put on a John Philip Sousa march, but I really encourage you to use something like a scarf while you're dancing. It will encourage the kids to move more of their body, to move their arms. 

A really fun one is The Aviary by Camille Saint Saens, that's from the Carnival of the Animals. And then give them two scarves and they're flying around the room. 

Sometimes I put on Schumann's The Wild Rider, which sounds like a horse galloping or Aaron Copland's Hoedown. Those are great for horse, so you could use this as your horsetail, as you're galloping around the room.

 Those are great for brain breaks in between subjects. Just turn on one of those songs, hand the kids scarves. These could be actual pretty scarves that you can buy, or you could just use a cloth napkin, [00:20:00] hand towel, whatever you have, just, just a piece of fabric that you cut. It doesn't have to be fancy. Remember, we're trying to find super easy ways to include music. 

The last one I wanted to mention is to possibly, if you're part of a co-op, get music into your co-op. There have been some great musical classes that we've had at the co-ops that I have attended. A lot of times I have taught early childhood music and movement classes to the preschoolers. I love to teach that class. It's so much fun, and they do a lot of the things that I mentioned here, like dancing with scarves, playing simple instruments, recognizing the animal sounds marching, and acting out music with their bodies. So that's a good class to add to your co-op. 

You could also do a group class, like have your kids learn recorder or bucket drumming. We've [00:21:00] done both of those at my co-op. I know others that have done choir, like they'll work on a couple of songs and then perform at Christmas time. They've done a musical, you can do a maybe a simple musical and have the kids dress up in costume and have some props and maybe a few set pieces. 

You could do, music appreciation or music history classes. One year we were learning 20th century history. At our co-op and I taught 20th century music history to go along with it. Each week I would come up with some new composers or a new style, like big band or folk music of the sixties or different composers that were doing some unusual things like John Cage and his prepared piano. That is a great class to add to your co-op. 

Okay. I have just gone through a bunch of simple, easy ways to [00:22:00] add music to your homeschool. I thought I would just list them one more time for you and you can say, "Maybe that one. Maybe that one." And get some ideas to be inspired to add music to your homeschool this year. So real quick, those were to 1: Read and sing nursery rhymes. 2: Play music in the background, create some playlist for different events of the day. 3: Make homemade instruments. 4: Buy some simple rhythm instruments and play with them. 5: Play music games like flashcards and bingo and apps. 6: Learn some beginning music theory. There's worksheets and apps and also those games will help you learn beginning music theory. 7: Take virtual music lessons. 8: Practice ear training by distinguishing instrument sounds, animal sounds, high and low pitches, different sounds in the egg shaker or your sound jars. [00:23:00] 9: Go to concerts, field trips, operas or musicals. 10: Do some Charlotte Mason music ideas like composer study, hymn study, or folk songs. 11: Read some living books about music. It could be the musical piece like Peter and The Wolf or composers or different styles. 12: And add music to your co-op, maybe Early Childhood Music and Movement, a group musical class, or learning music history or music appreciation. 

You can find links to everything that I have mentioned on my website or be sure to contact me if you want something specific. And I have courses of all types at Learn.MusicinOurHomeschool.com and it was a pleasure talking with you today. Bye-bye.

Find links to all resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/easy-ways-music-in-your-homeschool/