Bring music into your home with Rainbow Songs

Music has been a part of every culture and has endured through the ages.

From brightening one’s mood, to creating an atmosphere to helping dementia patients remember, music benefits people of all ages.

Rainbow Songs® is a program that was created to offer exciting and interactive music programs for children from birth to five years old. The program focuses the musical development of children. At each session, the child is accompanied by a parent or caregiver, which creates a musical bond between them.

By participating in Rainbow Songs, families can bring music back into their homes by singing and sharing experiences instead of just popping in a CD.

“Many people believe that they are not musical,” says Mike Whitla, founder and director of Rainbow Songs. “We believe that there is music in every individual and that all you need to do is try to bring it out.”

During the sessions, this is done by trying to make music. The classes provide a friendly, non-competitive environment that tries to bring out the musicality of all the participants.

“Our goal is to have people make more and more music together as a part of their daily lives,” Whitla says.

Children learn the structure of songs, including the music and the lyrics. This helps them learn how language and poetry are structured, and with repetition, helps them learn the sounds and shapes of words and how they fit together in families of words, in easy to remember phrases. This learning is combined with movement, making the learning fun.

Whitla has been a Toronto based performer, composer, producer and teacher for the past 15 years. He works with a variety of styles including jazz, classical, Indian, Latin-American, folk and popular music. He received his degree in Music from York University and he studied the Orff method of early childhood music education and classical guitar at the Royal Conservatory.

Throughout his travels to Japan, Korea, Bali, Republic of Georgia, Turkey, Guatemala, Cuba and Europe, Mike has been exposed to music from many cultures. He has also recorded two CDs of music for children, “Elephants Have Wrinkles” in 2000 and “Early Morning Knee-Slapping Tunes” in 2005.

Rainbow Songs runs their program out of the Whitby Central Library at 405 Dundas Street West. For more information, please call (416) 535 5247, email info@rainbowsongs.com or visit the website at www.rainbowsongs.com.