Melody Lane

Calvert School's "Melody Lane" video program is an excellent resource for teaching many children at once. Melody Lane, with its Mister Rogers/Sesame Street format, is designed for young children. Although older children find some of the segments a bit too precious, most of the lessons interest all age groups.

Basically, Melody Lane is a 32-lesson, six-video music-literacy video curriculum with lots of enrichment ideas in the accompanying manual. The first five lessons, introducing the instrument families, come from the Calvert First Grade supplement video program. After this, you learn about rhythm, beat, tempo, duration, and melody. An introduction to American and foreign folk music follows, then uses of music (movement, dramatic improvisation, and dance), two really fun segments on people who make instruments and how to make your own homemade instruments, four segments on famous composers (Bach and Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Aaron Copland), and four more segments on how to make and use various kinds of music (singing together, playing together, music as expression, music that tells a story, and music in religion).

I have not listed all the segments, but this will give you a fair idea.

Music styles covered emphasize the classical and folk side, but you'll find brief pop and jazz sequences as well.

All Calvert products are of excellent quality, and Melody Lane is no exception. The guidebook is first-class, with a week's worth (at least) of teaching tips and follow-up suggestions for each video segment. The video segments themselves are TV quality. These are not "talking-head" lectures, but visits to musicians' studios, demonstrations of musical techniques, play-along games, and much more.

Our family as a whole enjoyed the portions with professional musicians more than the segments featuring kids being taught by teachers. Marcy Marxer and Cathy Fink were great demonstrating folk instruments and American folk songs!

Your family won't learn how to read or play music from this series, unless you count those homemade instruments, but they will have a lot of fun and become musically literate.

-- Mary Pride