Prodigies excels in the preschool classroom.
Using Prodigies in your preschool classroom could go one of a few ways. You might set it up…
as a music center in an isolated part of the room that students rotate through
as a circle time activity to do as a whole class during morning meeting or in a similar period of the day
or as a stand-alone music class for preschool kids
However you set it up, don’t forget that children at this age (3-6) are prime for what we call “meaningful and memorable play with individual notes.” Kids at this age aren’t the best at reading music or playing the piano, but they have the unique skill of being able to develop perfect pitch in this time frame, so focus on the individual sounds and concepts in General Music Level 1 and Melodies to make the most of this time frame.
As an isolated center, you might setup the bells up in front of a computer, pull up the videos, and set a student up to work in that way. You could also use a tablet with one of our bell apps to cut down on room noise.
As a circle time activity, you might work your way through the Playtime, Preschool and Melodies sections of the curriculum one video every day. If you have a 180 day school year, you might need to repeat a video 2-3x, but that repetition will help your kids with achieving mastery over the concepts.
In a circle time or morning meeting setting, you might also have one student come up to play the bells and rotate different performers for different days. Depending on how many bell sets you do or don’t have, you could split them up among a few students and play together as an ensemble. Kids without bells can sing and hand-sign along instead.
As a stand-alone music class, there is A LOT you can do with Prodigies. Most of this is explicitly covered in the “Running a Prodigies Music Class” section, but the general flow of a class would be to
Sing, sign and play along with today’s video (i.e. Section 1.1, Hello C)
Repeat a second time if helpful/necessary/requested
Try playing the song with the sheet music
Complete the pencil/paper workbook activities
Go over any of the suggested questions and concepts presented at the beginning of each workbook section, or presented underneath the lessons in the “Read More” & Description areas.
Mix and match related videos (like a “One Note Study” from Performance Prodigies Chapter 1, or an easy episode of PsP Melodies like Melodies #1, or an age appropriate rhythm lesson from the same chapter or from Playtime Prodigies.