There are many ways to teach young children about music theory. For the younger child, I use colors to teach pitch, recognize notes, and enhance ear training. I like to use toys to teach a variety of musical concepts, because it engages the child, while teaching them at the same time.

For this activity, I used cars to reinforce the concept of the Solfege scale. Students were given cars of a variety of colors. They were then told to play the different cars onto the notes with the same color, singing as they did so. Following this, they were told to “drive their cars” on the staff at various tempos.

For this activity, we drove Adagio (slow), Moderato (medium speed), and Allegro (fast). After this, they were told to drive their cars at different speeds to different notes. For example, they would drive the yellow car “slowly” (Adagio) to Mi (the yellow note). They would also drive the light blue car rapidly (Allegro) to So (the light blue note). Doing activities like this enables children to play as they learn!