Music Bingo for Music Appreciation
[00:00:00] Welcome back to the Music in Our Homeschool podcast. I'm Gena Mayo from MusicinOurHomeschool.com, where I help busy homeschooling moms provide a high-quality music education with simple, enjoyable lessons that work for your whole family. Today, we're talking about what might be the easiest music appreciation activity you can add to your homeschool this week, music bingo games.
If you've ever wanted your children to learn more about music but felt overwhelmed about where to start, today's episode is just for you. One of the biggest challenges homeschool parents face is finding educational activities that are both effective and fun. We want our children to learn, but we want them to enjoy the process, too, and that's exactly why I love using games for music education.
Games create a relaxed atmosphere where learning happens naturally. Children don't always realize [00:01:00] how much they're absorbing because they're focused on playing and having fun. As homeschool parents, we love activities that work with multiple ages at the same time, too. So today I have three brand new resources available at Music in Our Homeschool. Three different music bingo games that will make learning about music easy, interactive, and memorable.
The first one is Musical Instruments Bingo Game. One of the foundational parts of music appreciation is learning to recognize instruments. I want your children to recognize the name of the instrument, what it looks like, what musical family it's from, and then finally, what it sounds like, which of course is the hardest part of the process.
When a child listens to an orchestra, a band, or an ensemble, or just a song on the radio or Spotify, it's [00:02:00] helpful if they can identify what they're hearing. Was that a flute? A trumpet? A violin? A bassoon? Learning instrument names also helps children become more engaged listeners
The Musical Instruments Bingo Game includes 30 unique bingo boards, making it perfect for families, co-ops, music classes, Sunday school classes, camps, or even just repeated use throughout the year. The game includes 24 instruments: accordion, banjo, bassoon, clarinet, cello, cymbals, double bass, drum set, dulcimer, flute, French horn, guitar, harp, oboe, organ, piano, saxophone, timpani drum, trombone, trumpet, tuba, ukulele, [00:03:00] violin, and xylophone or marimba.
Now, as you will notice, you've got all four instrument families covered. You've got your wind instruments with instruments like bassoon, clarinet, and flute. You've got your brass instruments with the tuba, trumpet, trombone, French horn. You've got your string family covered with violin, double bass, and cello, and harp. You've got your Percussion family with xylophone, timpani drum, cymbals, and drum set. You've also got some folk instruments like accordion, banjo, dulcimer. And you've got some keyboard instruments like piano and organ.
So you've got a wide variety, and on the bingo card, you will see a picture of the instrument and [00:04:00] its name. So as your child is playing, they'll become familiar with these instruments visually and begin recognizing them. After you play it a few times where you're just calling out the name of the instrument and they're finding it on their card, seeing how it's spelled, seeing what it looks like, eventually you can move on to the harder extension activity, which is to play the instrument sound and then let them find it on the card. It's very easy to find the instrument sounds on YouTube, so you could pull up xylophone solo or flute solo, and then just play a few seconds of it while the child finds it on their bingo card. I love this game because completely no prep. You just print and play.
The second bingo game focuses on composers. Now, you might be thinking, " will my kids really enjoy learning about composers?" Well, the answer [00:05:00] is yes, because it's a game. And composer study is one of the most valuable forms of music appreciation.
When children become familiar with composers, they begin making connections between musical styles, historical periods, famous works, and connecting it to history and geography in general. Memorizing names from a list, is very boring, but playing bingo, that's fun.
The Music Composers Bingo Game will include 30 unique bingo boards and 24 famous composers.
These are the names of the composers: Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein, Brahms, Chopin, Copland, Debussy, Gershwin, Glass, Handel, Haydn, Liszt, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Schubert, Robert Schumann, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, [00:06:00] Vivaldi, Wagner, and John Williams.
So you've got a wide variety of all four musical eras, such as the Baroque period with Bach and Handel and Vivaldi. You've got the Classical era with Mozart and Haydn. You have the Romantic era with composers such as Brahms, Beethoven, and Liszt. And you've got composers from the 20th century and modern periods such as Bernstein, Copland, Gershwin, Philip Glass and John Williams.
You also have a wide variety of countries that composers are from, such as France with Ravel, America with John Williams, Italy with Vivaldi, Russia with Tchaikovsky, Germany with Robert [00:07:00] Schumann, Austria with Mozart.
And you have composers that wrote different types of music with the Western classical tradition, such as operas with Verdi, ballets with Tchaikovsky, piano pieces with Liszt, modern minimalism with Glass, movie music with John Williams jazz blends with Gershwin, great symphonies with Beethoven, beautiful choral works with Bach and Handel.
So, ways that you can play this game include, similarly to the Instrument Bingo, is first of all, just call off the composer's name. Let the child see the picture of the composer on the card with their name, and start recognizing what they look like and how their name is spelled.
Then you can move [00:08:00] on to the more difficult way of playing the game, where you're playing a piece of music that belongs to that composer. Now, this will take a while because there are 24 of them, but eventually they can learn that Hedwig's Theme from Harry Potter belongs to John Williams, and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik belongs to Mozart, and Rhapsody in Blue belongs to Gershwin. This will be a really fun way to learn more classical music than probably you've done before.
All right, now we will move on to the third Music Bingo game, which is Musical Symbols. Now, this is an excellent way for helping to build musical theory skills I know many homeschool parents feel intimidated by music theory.
Maybe you didn't learn to read music yourself, and you don't know what any of the music symbols are, [00:09:00] so you worry that you won't be able to teach it effectively. But don't worry about it. You can learn alongside your child with this Music Symbols Bingo Game.
You'll be learning the symbols of treble and bass clef; quarter, half, whole, eighth notes; quarter, half, whole, and eighth rests; sharps, flats, and naturals; dynamic terms such as forte, piano, mezzo forte, mezzo piano, fortissimo, and
pianissimo; accent, staccato, and fermata; repeat sign; and four/four time. So again, you've got 24 different symbols that you'll start learning about, and you see the symbol there with the name, so you can start learning those Italian terms and how they're spelled and recognizing it in association with the symbol.
Instead of staring at a worksheet, children will interact with these symbols repeatedly during [00:10:00] play, and they'll begin recognizing them automatically. It's a very fun and easy way to start learning some music theory.
I encourage you to pick up one or all three of these bingo games today. Head over to the accompanying blog post to find the link.
And they are on sale if you're catching this podcast early, and then find some time to do it in your homeschool. It could be a quick Friday fun time activity, or do it as part of a music center. Could be a family game or a co-op class activity. Could be a review lesson, or if you teach in a school, a substitute plan.
These work surprisingly well with all ages. Younger children just enjoy matching the pictures and the symbols, and older students will reinforce concepts they may already know while helping their younger siblings. Even if your child is doing something like advanced music theory, doing the [00:11:00] Instrument Game by listening to the instruments or the Composer Game by listening to music belonging to that composer will really stretch those children's skills as well.
Sometimes we think in our, Sometimes we think in our homeschools that learning has to be complicated, but often the most effective learning happens through simple activities done consistently. A game played once may be fun. A game played regularly throughout the year can build genuine musical knowledge.
So head over to the blog post to find the Musical Instruments Bingo Game, the Music Composers Bingo game, and the Musical Symbols Bingo Game. Pick one or all three that will fit your homeschool needs for this year. And thank you so much for joining me today.
If you're enjoying the Music in Our Homeschool podcast, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with another homeschool parent who also wants music education to be simple and enjoyable in [00:12:00] her homeschool.
Until next time, keep making music a joyful part of your homeschool.
Find links to all resources mentioned in this episode here: https://musicinourhomeschool.com/music-bingo-games/
