Music Classes for Toddlers & Preschoolers In Boston: A Guide
At Loudlands Music Lab, we offer piano lessons to a wide range of age groups and abilities, from young kids to seniors, and from beginners to experts. We do recommend that formal private music lessons at a music school start around five years old, when a child’s hand is large enough and developed enough to press the keys — and also when their attention span is long enough to sit at a bench and focus on playing. For more info, check out our full blog post on “What Age to Start Piano Lessons for Kids?”
However, just because your kid isn’t old enough yet to start seriously practicing an instrument, that doesn’t mean that music classes for toddlers and preschoolers can’t help to start your kid thinking about and feeling music. Early childhood music classes can give your kid a head start if and when they do commit to piano classes.
Purpose of Music Classes for Preschoolers & Toddlers
There are many local music schools that offer classes for very young children where the parents and kids team up to make sounds with a variety of instruments — for toddlers, the music class is taught with bongos, maracas, shakers, etc., while for preschoolers there are sometimes simple tonal instruments involved, such as ukuleles and xylophones.
The purpose of these early childhood music lessons, while not to formally train your child on an instrument, is more to have them explore music and sound. This can help them become familiar with the basic concepts of music, such as rhythm, meter, tempo, etc. These concepts will become ingrained in them, making teaching them whichever instrument they choose much easier to learn as the foundation of music will already be there.
A child at that age is like a knowledge sponge, soaking up information and stimulation from the environment around them. So, infants, preschoolers, and toddlers can greatly benefit from music classes such as these. Even if your child does not end up seriously studying piano as an instrument, or music in general, these core concepts, and the abilities gained from learning them, will greatly enrich your child’s mind and help their development.
Music Classes in Boston for Preschoolers & Toddlers
Little Groove Music and Art
Little Grove Music and Art teaches music lessons in several locations in the Boston and Greater Boston Area. They teach music lessons to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. Kids (and parents!) can expect to interact with a wide variety of colorful musical instruments and other objects. All classes are taught with accompanying live music, and kids are encouraged to learn concepts such as quiet, loud, stop and go (with the music), up shake, down shake, etc. All parents are also given a play-along guidebook so that the music lessons can continue at home.
These music classes for young children stress the importance of developing the executive function of multi-tasking with your kids’ bodies and minds that is necessary to play music (and quite helpful for everything else, too!). They illustrate all these concepts with music, performed by the teacher and assisted by your child, and roll all this learning up in an entertaining bow so that your kids don’t even know they are learning — they are simply playing and exploring, just with guidance.
Groovy Baby Music
Groovy Baby Music is part of a larger organization, Music Together, and offers music classes in several languages, both indoors and outdoors, in several locations.
Their specialty is that all of their teachers are simultaneously professional musicians and certified in early childhood development — so you know that the classes are structured in the optimal way for your children to begin to learn music.
They also include access to an exclusive Facebook group once you join that has a constantly updated library of childhood music resources to continue the learning process at home, as well as fostering a community of like-minded parents and caregivers.
The Dance Academy
The Dance Academy is a dance and music school in Newton specializing in young children — that is, toddlers and preschoolers. They teach several classes, including private music lessons if you prefer a more intimate setting, as well as group music classes if you’d like to find other parents who want their kids to learn together.
Their philosophy is that learning to move to music by dancing is the best way to teach the concepts of rhythm and tempo behind music, as well as that a child’s physical development is reflective of their mental development and so movement is essential to make sure the brain is developing properly.
The classes also stress caregiver development by teaching parents and caregivers how to continue developing their children’s brains and bodies through music at home. They include supplemental materials as well as in-class instruction to assist with this process.
My Gym Boston
My Gym Boston has many locations where they teach music classes in the Greater Boston Area. Though they do not specialize specifically in music — more in movement classes for children, some of which are based around music and some are not — and they are consistently highly rated by parents. When you sign up specifically for the music class, you can feel confident that they are on par with the other Greater Boston music schools listed here in terms of their ability to teach core music concepts to your young kids.
As one of the oldest schools listed here (35+ years), they have had a long history of well-thought out and developed early childhood education programs and classes. They also offer event coordination such as birthday parties. The first class is always free, so there’s no reason not to try it out!
Early Childhood music classes Near Me
Though your infant, toddler, or preschool child may not yet be ready for formal piano lessons, it is definitely still useful to enroll them in some kind of music class specifically tailored to their age group and abilities.
These classes help to not only develop your child’s mind and body, and assist them in hitting age appropriate milestones in their development, but also to teach them core musical concepts and skills such as rhythm, tempo, melody, and more. This is done in different fashions in different classes and schools, but all teach these core concepts, as well as offer additional information, so kids (and parents!) can keep practicing at home.
This musical foundation gives an amazing head start and makes learning music more formally through private piano classes much easier and faster, as your child will come prepared already. And best of all, all these classes are fun!
