Smart Start: 5 Years | The Royal Conservatory of Music

Smart Start: 5 Years

Instructor:Oscar Peterson School of Music Faculty

Course Description

Around the five-year mark, children make huge developmental leaps and begin to actively create with what they've learned.

What Happens in Class
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My child's birthday happened before the Summer Term. Shouldn't they move to the next level/age group?

Summer Smart Start is a stand-alone program designed to consolidate learning at the end of a term for current students or give new students an introduction to the program. As with all Smart Start classes, the program is organized by birth year to allow us to plan appropriately for the learning needs and experience level of the children. Current students remain in their own cohort to prepare for the next level of Smart Start in September.

The study of musical concepts through singing, movement and instruments is a key component of this class.

Teachers lead the class through pedagogy designed to improve children's senses of rhythm, metre, melody, pitch, timbre and the beginning of harmony. Basic melodic phrasing and rhythmic notation are introduced, leading to a solid rudimentary understanding of musical form.

At age five, children have a rich inner mental life, and Smart Start music classes are designed to support and build off their increased cognitive abilities. These classes focus on musical skills that utilize these new skills, such as audition, musical form, and beat and rhythm activities. Because of their increasing communication skills, teachers in these courses also focus on providing musical terminology to help children articulate their musical knowledge.

In this course, students will be given a solid musical foundation to support their future musical activities and explorations. By the end of the course, the children will be able to recognize, repeat, and write basic rhythmic and melodic notation--valuable skills in their future formal Royal Conservatory musical training.