music and art for the early years…help!

There are some really fun books that your children will enjoy about music:

The Story of the Orchestra by Robert Levine and Meredith Hamilton (from Amazon) is a book and CD combo set that introduce children to the various instruments of the orchestra and the CD has corresponding music featuring the instruments. It also introduces children to the different musical eras with composer pictures and brief biographies.

Can You Hear It? by William Lach (on Amazon) is another book and CD combo that pairs famous music pieces with beautiful art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a lot of fun, and perfect for your kids ages.

The Carnival of the Animals by Jack Prelutsky (book/CD combo from Amazon) features poetry from Jack Prelutsky (read by him) and the music of Camille Saint-Saens. Each movement of music features a different animal and you can hear the lion roaring, the fish swimming, etc. Delightful. There are coloring books online for this as well as some really fun YouTube videos.

Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf: by Janet Schulman is another really delightful experience. (Available as book/cd combo on Amazon that features a Fully-Orchestrated and Narrated CD.)  There is a really fun YouTube play of this. Here is a link.

Look at this page for several folk song options:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=folk+songs+for+children

It is instrumental only, but we also like We Gather Together by Green Hill Music, produced by Craig Duncan.

The kids like Wee Sing CD’ s.  Wee Sing and Move is a good one and has some classical pieces included.  Wee Sing America is patriotic.