Ahh loves this! Thank you for sharing!! Yeah my daughter has been making up tons of songs and singing to herself even more since this! It’s so cool to see!

@@theconfusedmom hi!

So happy to hear it! I said “it may not be as beneficial (or something like that)” because I have no background and didn’t want musically inclined parents to look at me sideways like “this is obvious stuff here” haha so I’m thrilled to see multiple comments with music backgrounds giving it the 👍👍

Ahh so happy to hear it!

Ahh happy almost birthday to her! She's going to have a blast! My 4 year old has played with them almost every day! Even setting up "booby traps" with them haha!

Someone just mentioned that, thank you!! And for anyone going through the comments: Their bells are currently sold out, and typically cost $100 for the complete set and $75 for the 5 bell set -- but I'm adding the song book to the links! bit.ly/3Lc52a9

@@theconfusedmom Yeah I hadn’t checked their prices in a while but I knew they we expensive. I didn’t actually realize they had a 5 bell set. But I’m so glad Lovevery came out with their set because I really don’t care for the screen aspect of prodigies and it just didn’t seem worth it to only get the bells and songbook because I don’t have a great background in teaching music.

Ahh we’ve been using that quite a bit!! And I think the review will be out in the next month or so! I’ll keep that in mind as I curate the dupes and talk about that specifically!!

For sure!

So many people are hoping for international deliveries being available and easier!! I hope they figure it out! Their manufacturer is a German toy company’s china watehouse

@@theconfusedmom that's really interesting! Thank you for your response and all your amazing videos! You inspire me so much on how to raise my first baby (he'll turn 2 months old tomorrow ♡). I really appreciate all the hard work and passion you put into your amazing blog and KZfaq channel :) Sending love from Germany 🤗☃️

I think it might be now actually!

Yes it does!

For sure! Mine is 4.5+ and loves it! Music instruments never go out of style and I think it def depends on your child’s interests in “reading” and following instructions but it really is the perfect time for her with “reading” the music

@@theconfusedmom I ordered it... 👀😁. And I'm so excited!

You’re comments are always so insightful and thorough! Seriously I’m def implementing some of these! The dot marker is brilliant!! I think your exactly the person I was referring to who wouldn’t find value in this! Financially it is on par with self curating from what I could find so idk if it’s overpriced, but with your knowledge base and such diverse instruments in the home you’re light years ahead! I do agree though when I saw the bells dupe had 8 I couldn’t help but wonder why they limited teachings to five notes and how quickly my 4 year old will ultimately master it… I saw on their sales page today they “made it with parents ears in mind” and wanted to only “include notes that sound good together” no matter what order they’re played… so I’m guessing they knew it would ruffle some others would feel like us. But ultimately I’m happy with it for now. Also the pear and avocado is really teaching syllables/notes it’s for teaching kids to clap on the beat (syllable) I had a feel that was NOT how it was typically taught which is why I didn’t try to find a book dupe for it. Do you have a suggestion not tied to a specific instrument?

@@theconfusedmom Thank you. Oh wow, I didn't see that they reduced it to 5 bells with the explanation "parent's ears in mind" - I would have assumed it's to reduce costs. That makes it worse for me - that is such a culturally difficult statement to make since a lot of cultures actually do not have the idea of the pentatonic scale sounding particularly good as we do in Western Centric cultures. But not even sure if I buy that statement of theirs - especially with bells, it would be so easy to include 8 and just give a tip to the parents to remove bells and add, as necessary. To me, the core of early childhood musical education is to "educate" a child's ear. Therefore, at least include all natural notes? There is a reason any instrument, including singing, always teaches scales - up and down. It's how the ear gets accustomed to the differences between notes and how "far apart" notes are from each other. It can be helpful to reduce the amount of notes by utilizing the pentatonic scale but AFTER understanding note distances. So if the focus of the kit would be to include simplified instruments to make it easy for kids to play songs, then ok - but the kit is supposed to be educational in music, so it's really lacking not to even include all the naturals. I see it like this: kids literally don't even learn all natural notes with the kit, so what is the point of all the more complex academical aspects of the kit, if it already fails there (is it really helpful for my kid to learn the difference of 120 bpm vs 250 or is it enough to say slow, moderate, fast since with this kit they don't even learn how an F sounds 🤯 ). Plus, it's actually really fun and a great exercise for toddlers to play do-re-mi (or any variations of it) on Xylophone/piano/etc to learn to only hit one note at a time and just going up and down (this way they're playing a song even if following notes on paper is still too complex for them - so simplification is possible without reducing the amount of notes). The reason I particularly mentioned note durations in the book is mostly because of the idea to teach that to kids and in that weird way on top of it, when you first want to focus on rhythm. Note durations are meaningless otherwise. I had a piano teacher as a kid who approached it very mathematically and used pizza as note symbols (whole pizza, half pizza, quarter pizza) to introduce note durations to me - it was memorable enough that I still remember that today 😆 a way I find very intuitive to learn about rhythm and note duration, is marching. It's actually a pretty popular way to teach it - get the kids marching (my kids love marching, so it was the way to go for us), then add counting and clapping as they can handle it. Once that connection is made, a popular way is to teach for one big daddy step, mommy needs two medium steps, while the kids march 1-2-3-4 (lots of online material out there with this or similar methods). Anyway, it's not really something I focus on with my kids, except for fun - I find getting a feeling for rhythms more helpful and fun. We often clap to the rhythm of songs we like and it gives kids such a great feeling of sometimes we say several syllables/words during one clap (easy ones to start with would be the ABC song or row, row, row your boat - my kids also absolutely love to clap to my favorite things). Another thing that stuck out to me on Lovevery's homepage, was the explanation why they introduced a metronome. Seriously, in all my years playing an instrument and singing (including orchestra and choir), I can count on one hand where we actually used one - otherwise I pretty much only saw it in school when it was part of the curriculum 😂 lovevery says that kids have difficulty with mixing up faster and loud - I can see that later when playing certain instruments (some wind instruments you actually need to learn certain breathing techniques to play e.g. fast+quiet successfully) but I never heard it to be a general problem 🤔🤷‍♀️ Anyway, I found good old head, shoulders, knees and toes the easiest way to get my kids to understand that you can play a song in different speeds - and I can guarantee you that they sing it loud, no matter if they sing it slow, moderate or fast 😁 So we don't really have educational books about music - like using paint to mix colors, hands on is the way for us with music, or more precisely ears on 😆 But both my kids liked the baby's big world music board book when they were young toddlers - definitely more for 18 months olds and very simple, so not like the academical way of lovevery's booklet. It introduces music terminology in a comprehensive and easy way, though (it's the reason why my kids often refer to loud and quiet as forte and piano, which is absolutely hilarious in a 2 and nearly 4 year old 😂 ). The ideas in lovevery's booklet are usually what I see in the first couple pages of kid's song collections - I mostly have foreign ones, so no concrete recommendation here. Btw, such collections also often have great suggestions for games and exercises for teaching certain concepts with certain songs. So that's what I would recommend looking for as a dupe - a lot of these are called something like my first songbook or similar. I do know that Prodigies brand has a well rated one - but do not own it, so I'm not sure what exactly is inside or if it's similar to lovevery (it's been on my list to get for the kids for a while though).

It's technically rated safe for 18 months and up... but personally, with birthdays that fall between October- Feb, I often get items that they need to "grow into" since it's so close to the holidays. Additionally, I think 1 year olds will have fun with the items (supervised). I'd much rather my one year old push the bells than push the mosaic music cube (super popular baby music toy I talk about in the baby music toys blog post). They def won't be able to use the pan flute and I probably wouldn't introduce the music book yet. The concertina may just get smashed around (which still does produce music and my 2 year old does this still in addition to playing it properly), but shakers, jingler, and bells should be good to go right out of the box at that age!

Thanks! I think I’ll get it.

Definitely! She's closer to 5 than to 4 - and music instruments are things she always picks up. We have 8 and 11 year old friends over who always "start a band" with the kids so I don't think they'll go untouched unless I got better instruments down the road. Plus the way the book is set up, as she learns how to use it more, she'll be able to do it independenltly which i dont think will happen until 5+ for her

yeah.

www.theconfusedmillennial.com/fbqb - I have some cheaper dupes linked in todays video /blog though

I don’t and dk if I’ll make one, it’s epic kids though!

Oh gosh metronomes aren’t silent lol so I have no idea. Sometimes my brain moves faster than my mouth and the wrong word comes out. Do you have a time stamp so I can figure it out haha

7:44

@@wisdomencouraged9326 OMG I know what that was 🤣🤣🤣 That's my brain being in Garageband WAY to much for my own good where I have the settings set for the metronome just ticking, but not audible LOL and editing WAY to much content when I did this video - I can hear the exhaustion in my voice lol Thanks for catching it!