I’ve noticed a lot of preschool music teachers feel overwhelmed trying to continually come up with new, fresh material for their preschool music classes. Preschool activities are usually short and quick, so it takes a large volume of material in order to fill a class and to keep the kids occupied and engaged.
Constantly finding new material and working it into a lesson plan can be completely exhausting. It feels like we’re spinning our wheels and always on the hunt for new ideas, songs and resources.
However, one of the most important aspects of working with preschoolers is that they thrive on repetition. Anyone who spends time with the under 5 crowd knows that preschoolers love to do the same thing over and over again. Babies never get tired of playing peek-a-boo. Toddlers will ask to hear the same story every day, and often multiple times within the same day. Preschoolers never complain about hearing a well-loved song one more time.
Not only do preschoolers love hearing the same songs and doing the same activities over and over again, they also really important as they are fine-tuning their developmental skills. And, they need repetition and consistency to feel comfortable and secure. It creates familiarity and helps them thrive.
This is great news for preschool music teachers!
This means that we absolutely do NOT need to come up with fresh material for every class. We don’t have to introduce new and exciting things each week. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel in each music class.
Instead, we need to create a predictable and consistent routine surrounding preschool music classes so that our students will come to know what to expect.
In my own preschool music classes, I follow the exact same formula in every single class. The kids quickly learn when it’s time to put one activity away and to move on to the next. They get into a rhythm of how music class works. This feeling of consistency helps them to feel comfortable and confident while they are here.
And, even better news: You can and should reuse the same lesson plan many times. Every class doesn’t have to be completely different. In fact, you’ll notice your students really taking off with new skills after they have repeated an activity several times.
I wanted to share with you two resources that are really helpful for creating consistent, predictable lessons for your students.
First, my course, Preschool Music Lesson Plan Crash Course will save you tons of time each week as you learn the best tricks for whipping out awesome lesson plans in a jiffy. I show you the exact formula I follow for every class and it comes with enough lesson plans to last almost an entire school year.
Click here to learn more about the Preschool Music Lesson Plan Crash Course.
The second resource that can help you create simple repetitive material for your students is The Preschool Lesson Plan Wizard.
The Preschool Lesson Plan Wizard is a build-your-own lesson plan product to help you quickly create your own fun and engaging lesson plans for preschool music classes.
If you take the Preschool Music Lesson Plan Crash Course, you’ll learn the quick and simple brainstorming process that I go through when I coming up with new themes and new lesson plan ideas.
The result of my brainstorming process is WAY more material than I could ever possibly use in a single class. Actually, a lot of time I end up with a month’s worth of classes from one short brainstorming session.
In the Preschool Lesson Plan Wizard, you get to skip the brainstorming process and just take all of those ideas and activities to use however it suits your class the best.
There are 12 themes in the Preschool Lesson Plan Wizard and easily enough material to use each theme for a month. If you take the Preschool Music Lesson Plan Crash Course, you’ll know a simple formula to follow, then you can just plug your favorite activities into that formula. Or, if you already have a music class routine that you know and love, you can just pick and choose which activities will work best for you.
Click here to learn more about The Preschool Lesson Plan Wizard.