Home School Product Reviews

Music Ace Deluxe

I highly recommend Music Ace Deluxe. I purchased it for my 7-yr-old son. He enjoyed it and always did more ‘lessons’ than I asked him to do. I am a piano teacher. The students who must sit and wait for siblings, do Music Ace. They look forward to the ‘wait’ now. The software keeps records of the progress of multiple students. It makes music theory fun. I like that it teaches pitch, rhythm, tempo and more while demonstrating with classic music.

Software can really enhance your homeschool curriculum. Timberdoodle offers many homeschool software programs.

Piano for Life DVD

Piano for Life is the best music coarse we have ever found.  Within 1 year, our son was composing music and has begun to teach other students using this DVD as a base.  However, it seems to be best suited for teenage kids.  Adults don’t usually have the time to spend practicing and preteens don’t have the discipline to follow through on their own.  There maybe something to personal gifting regarding music, so don’t necessarily expect your student to progress abnormally fast. You can expect any student to come away from Piano for Life with an excellent understanding of theory and the ability to play an instrument for pleasure.

Mr Pipes and Psalms and Hymns of the Reformation

My daughters (8 & 10) and I have really enjoyed this series of books.  The story and characters are engaging plus a solid overview of church history by following the hymns.  Do note, there is a bias toward traditional hymn music and away from modern American worship music.  I found that I agreed with most of the statements.  Even better, they provided discussion starters with my daughters to encourage them to think about the music we listen to and what truly is praise.

The lyrics and sheet music are included for a sampling of each hymn writer, but I really do wish they’d make a cd set to go along!  However, it’s very easy to find midis or mp3s of quite a few of the hymns if you don’t read music.

Definitely recommended.

Music Ace Deluxe

Our entire family – from 18 months old to 35 years uses Music Ace for our music theory.  The older children happily pull the toddler onto their laps so she can enjoy watching the dancing notes while they learn the basics of music.  Set up in an easy to use format it can be loaded onto multiple computers and runs without the disc installed.  Even our 10 year old iMac runs this program with no problems!  (Although we did need to upgrade our quicktime player to do it.)  By far the best investment in music we have made.