We're going on a journey - CBeebies Prom 2016!

You may have noticed I've had a break from blogging over the summer but now I'm back and have something very exciting to review:

we were lucky enough to get tickets to go the CBeebies Prom! We have just come back home, having seen it on Sunday (28th August).

Making music doesn't have to be expensive

Watching and taking part in performing arts can be expensive, even for children. And often not just a little expensive, but £££. Going to the theatre costs money, learning a musical instrument costs money, even singing in a local choir can involve a fee. 

However, there are some things you can do that, whilst not totally free (because what is), can cost a lot less, and so I'm going to try to cover some of those things in this blog as well. 

The most obvious "free" way to make music is what my baby boy likes to do - give him a wooden spoon and he will bash the floor and walls, giggling. (Eventually, he might work out he can bash the upturned pan I keep putting in front of him, but so far it seems that the floor is an easier target!)

My daughter also likes bashing things with a spoon, but as she is at the age/stage where "things to be bashed" can sometimes also include her brother, we tend to do this activity less often when she is around! Instead, we sit down to sing nursery rhymes with shakers which are shaken and banged (and occasionally thrown), sometimes even in time to the music...

The shakers we use are homemade and contain food stuff so if they do open up and spill, it won't matter if either child takes it upon themselves to eat the contents. Our old shakers were looking a bit tired so recently my daughter and I made some more...

Classical music for babies: online resouces

After discussing my baby watching Andre Rieu concerts in the last post I thought I would look a little bit further into other online resources for classical music for babies.  This is very much a work in progress at the moment: my plan is to create master lists for music and theatre resources, ideally also categorised by age, so this is just a start...

Orchestral concerts for babies?

I'll be honest with you, sometimes I find being a mum bloody hard work. I have two gorgeous children and I know how lucky I am, I really do, but sometimes I do find it difficult trying to cook for, tidy after and play with two Under-3's at the same time. I'll admit that sometimes - sssssh! - I resort to screentime...

Actually, I don't think that a little (carefully chosen!) screentime is too bad really. You'll see CBeebies mentioned a fair bit in this blog because I think they do provide some very good music and arts programming. However, my daughter's first taste of screentime wasn't actually CBeebies.

Karl-Heinz Meurer [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons