Do you know what a nyckelharpa is? It's an old Swedish stringed instrument like a violin and played with a bow.
Even though this information was probably available in a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, we never owned the expensive tomes, and neither was I one to pore over books. But these days it's all accessible. There is loads of amazing content online that can be used to teach children about the world. But we do need to be able to harness that information in child-friendly feeds.
Peapod Labs has done just that by creating ABC Music. It uses only verified sources of information online and transforms them into a fun app to learn about the ABCs through music.
The best way for children to learn about the world is through experiencing it. Reading about a bagpipe is one way to learn about it, as is looking at a picture of one. But what if you could hear the sonority of pipes or make the bagpipe produce a sound? Then children have double the opportunity to make sense of the instrument. This is especially true for instruments that we may not find so easy to expose our children to, such as a nyckelharpa.
All the alphabets in ABC Music feature beautiful photographs made available through Creative Commons licences and an interactive media clip such as a video or an image for children to colour in to reveal and play the instrument. Each slide spells out the instrument and tapping on the letters will bring up other instruments starting with that letter. Older children can bring up bite-sized fun facts about the instrument from various sources.
ABC Music features more than 50 instruments and words to discover and hundreds of curated photos from Flickr and videos off YouTube. Of course, that means you will need a good internet connection to get the most out of the video playback. I found that not all the videos were age-appropriate. I cannot imagine my two-year-old godson, caring about how a 150-year-old trumpet maintains its mellow tone.