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Preschool Prodigies
LESSONS FOR THE YOUNG MUSICIAN
The Preschool Prodigies Kickstarter
1. Intro
2. Why Preschool Prodigies?
3. The Learning System
4. Kickstarter Goals
5. Kickstarter Rewards
Lots of great projects are being launched on Kickstarter these days and so we're giving it a shot!
If you're new to our site, Preschool Prodigies is a music learning show for kids. Designed to be interactive, educational and fun, the show introduces children to individual sounds (notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B, c) as colorful characters.
The show provides parents and teachers with a fun-to-follow system for giving Young Musicians a musical head start. By practicing along with our videos, your Young Musician's musical sense will grow by leaps and bounds and they will be set on a path for musical success.
Kickstarter Intro
Lead by host Mr. Rob, the bells go on musical adventures that provide children with meaningful exposure to individualized notes. The characters play songs, learn about music, and conduct ear-training games, all while children follow along on a set of colorful bells.
The show is designed to give children everywhere easy access to meaningful exposure to individual notes. It has been shown that when children ages 3-6 are given this kind of musical exposure on a regular basis, that they will grow up with a strong sense of perfect (or absoulte) pitch.
Why PSP
Children ages three through six are in the critical period for language and auditory development. Sounds learned in this time period are stored in deep memory and therefore more internalized than sounds learned at an older age.
Therefore, this age is CRUCIAL for a well rounded music education.
It is rare, however, to find preschool music teachers and lessons that focus on meaningful exposure to individual notes. Most preschool music classes focus on movement, number songs, learning phonics through music, etc.. While music is a great medium for teaching children other subjects, we use music to teach kids about music.
These specific kind of music lessons are generally expensive and hard to find. Furthermore, many preschools cannot afford music teachers. We are committed to spreading this kind of early education to audiences that have otherwise not discovered it or cannot afford a teacher.
Our videos will provide Young Musicians in homes and classrooms everywhere with music lessons that they can go through over and over. The repitition and eventually predictability of the lessons will empower children and build their confidence while giving them hours and hours of practice.
Furthermore, our online video lessons will reach thousands of classrooms and families. In a time when funding for arts education is hard to come by, our learning system will provide classrooms with affordable and effective early arts education.
Our Kickstarter Hopes and Goals
So far our team has been very small, namely myself (Rob Young) , director and co-designer of the show Jeff Sedwick, and my wife Sam Young who occassionally spell checks our material!
We have almost completed the first full episode and we've already written a large portion of the parent manual and student guidebook. All of our our art, animations, music and website design has been done in house. While we'd like to think we can create lots of strong material, we do have very limited resources and lots of ideas for PSP that we could only pursue with your help.
The first learning system that we are creating consists of the following
1 set of Chromanotes C Diatonic Deskbells (8 bells)
6 Twenty minute video episodes (DVD or download)
1 Lesson Companion Book
1 Young Musician Workbook
1 Parent/Teacher Guidebook
Extras such as CD based listening games, play-a-long CD's, and access to follow up lessons and videos via our website
The potential for this learning system is large, and so we've outlined our intial plans, our kickstarter goal and some of our reach goals if we break our intial one.
$5,000 - We will complete the writing, production, and filming of the first three episodes. We will also release all three episodes along with the corresponding parent guide and Young Musician Companion Book.
We will release the episodes and books for sale as well as upload many of the segments to YouTube, TeacherTube, and our own site for free viewing.
$7,500 - We will complete the writing, production, and filming of a episodes 4-6. As before, we will release the corresponding book materials and publish several of the segments for free online.
$10,000 - If we raise $10,000 we will design a web game that allows children to play the bells on the screen while watching the video. This would remove the neccesity of having the bells in front of you. This would allow classrooms with multiple children to practice music on the computer or via headphones.
$15,000 - If we are lucky enough to get this kind of funding, we will begin the creation of a Preschool Prodigy iPad app. The v1.0 of the app will most likely be a container for our videos as well as some kind of simple on-screen set of bells. A version 2.0 of the app would probably look more like a video-game (ie www.poptropica.com, www.starfall.com, etc)
At this point we would also begin production on a more advanced set of videos that would require either several more bells, or a piano.Though it's speculation so far, we thought that a slightly more advanced show would look slightly more Bill-Nye the Science Guy than the cartoon-esque world imagined thus far.
$25,000 - A big step toward perfect pitch education would be to design more toys similar to the Chromanotes bells. A series of errorless toys that could give children meaningful exposure to individual notes would expand the potential for musical learning to a variety of areas as well as to younger children.
The simplest and most powerful of these toys would most likely be a set of colored ball that chimed it's corresponding pitch. The balls could be used in a variety of musical and non-musical games.
Other toys might range from puzzles with pitched components to stuffed animals that interact with their pitches.
One thing we promise to always keep at the fore front of our products is exposure to individual notes. There are lots of stuffed toys that play music, and even more colorful musical instruments in stores. Our products will always be designed to make sure children are connecting pitch to color in a fun and meaningful way.
$40,000+ - Finally, and we hope that this comes in the future regardless of our kickstarter, we hope to create a prequel series for younger children (ages 1-3) and a sequel series for older children (ages 7+) using a similar style of video and software based learning.
If we do achieve this level of funding, we will certainly be able to commit the resources and hire the help needed to produce tons and tons of content.
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