learnwithmummy123: MusikGarten KK

Mika have been attending music classes at MusikGarten Kota Kinabalu for a little over a month now. It's not really your typical music classes teaching instruments (like piano) per se, it's more of a singing and dancing class for toddler aged 16 months to 4 years old accompanied by parent. Musikgarten have several music classes catering to children in different age group, even as young as a newborn.

I decided to expose Mika to music class early, hoping he would learn to appreciate music better, and Mika already love dancing so hopefully the class would do a lot of good things for him.

We first started with a trial class before committing to the full term as I wanted to have a feel at the environment. My husband and I both took Mika to his first class and I was very excited to see how he would react. And he loved it! Infact I think he loved it too much to the point that he would not sit still because he was too excited! He kept wanting to run around the room and stop to show his dance move. I would not have been bothered so much if the other kids were doing the same (actively running around like how kids normally do, I mean) but surprisingly most of them were sitting with their parent obediently and making my Mika look bad haha! But I think Mika was just too excited to see new friends so it was no big deal. And the class that we joined was nearing to the end of its term so most of the children knew each other and are familiar with the environment, unlike my eager Mika.

See how the other kids were all sitting down except for my lil attention seeker.

Mika enjoyed his first lesson so much I decided to sign up for a term. The fee per term is RM140 and there's a registration fee (one time charge only) of RM25. There's also an additional fee of RM120 for the music pack containing parent's manual, music cd and 2 sets of rhythm sticks for home practice.

After several classes, Mika is now more calmer in his music class. He adore his teacher very much and is now more willing to follow instructions to the activities. He would still like to do things his own way sometimes but that's how kids are right. My husband wasn't impressed with the first session saying we can easily do this at home but I insisted that it's best to learn in this environment. Seeing how Mika is learning from the activities and his progress so far made my husband changed his mind :)

Musicgarten's philosophy in essence is teaching music to children because it can benefit them in many areas of life and especially helpful in building self esteem, confidence, creativity and also family bonding because the activities involved parent-child participation. Plus it FUN!

A typical musicgarten session for toddler would last about 30 minutes and each session will start with a greeting song. The teacher will ask each children how they would like to be greeted, either by clapping hand, stomp feet, tap on lap, etc and she would round the room to introduce each child to the class. This is then followed by singing, chanting, moving, dancing, listening and playing simple instruments like rhythm sticks, rattles and drums. The session is then concluded with a goodbye song and we would all go home happy from all the singing and dancing (good workout too).

Sample session from the website

For KK mommies who are looking for a music class that can work like a playdate, I would highly recommend Musikgarten class :)

Here are some photos I took at Mika's music class. I took lots of photos in the first few classes but stopped because I wanted more quality time doing the activities with Mika. And before, my husband used to join the class as well but later we decided to only let one parent sit in for each session because Mika gets easily distracted when both Mummy and Abah is around during class.