New Joyful Community Excitement!

Check out our Meetup! I never knew March could be so festive with green being our main theme!

I am loving this festive time together with our new community, Music Makers!

This month, we are learning St. Patrick's Day is Coming, a song I wrote with my 10 year old student, Maya, during our ukulele lesson.

What a fun way to enjoy each month with a festive song that we can all sing and play together.

It's so wonderful that we can take what we learned in our Meetup and practice it all month.

We are meeting back next Thursday, March 9, at 2pm ET so you can play me what you practiced and I can give you some feedback.

And I am learning so much from my members, too!

Like I heard my first limerick, spoken by Hanna, our 9 year old Music Maker, she said,

"There once was a mid March day,

Where people would gather and say:

'St. Patrick's Day is here,

Let's wear green and give cheer.'

And then they partied the evening away."

What a fun way to expand our...

Here is the replay of our December Group Lesson for the new Living Music Community and I invite you to join us every first Thursday of the month.

Mark January, 5, 2023 at 2pm ET/ 11am PT onto your calendar.

Also, I need your suggestions, What songs or ideas do you have about our next time we meet? 

We don't have to work on a song either, I am open to your musical questions too!

Just email me at [email protected] 

I would love to hear your suggestions.

A new Community portal is coming soon to my website, I am so excited!

It is in beta testing now, but I will let you know more about it when it is ready.

I can't wait to finally have a place to hang out with you all the time!

We can share our music ideas and learn from each other and become great friends.

Welcome to our 3rd community meeting, here you will learn a family song that our family enjoyed during October and November, called The Pumpkin Pie Song.

Come along and learn to sing it, and pick your instrument part, ranging from beginning to advanced.

I will teach you the notes and the chords.

Click Here for the lesson plan.

Learn a simple 3 note melody that fits you and your level and favorite instrument

• vocals
• pennywhistle
• recorder
• ukulele
• piano

Learn only 3 chords for

• guitar
• ukulele
• baritone ukulele
• piano.

Years ago, I found The Pumpkin Pie Song in the book Festivals Family and Food: Guide to Seasonal Celebration by Diana Carey and Judy Large.

I first began learning it on pennywhistle. I added chords to it, and arranged it myself. I have never heard it played any where, so I just had to be creative when trying it all out. 

I thought it would be great arrange it with added guitar chords and with this simplified pennywhistle melody...

Check out our very first meeting!?!?!

I had no idea what we were going to discover or what this new community wanted, so let the journey begin!

We had a wonderful time together of sharing about our music journey. 

Join us next time.

We meet the first Thursday of each new month at 2pm Eastern Time. Please mark your calendars.

I was telling Angie how our meeting went because she wasn’t able to make it, I said, me personally, I was overwhelmed with the love that I felt. We had 3 kids join, and they are so pure and full of this amazing love that is so different and sweet, I long for this kind of love in our adult world for each other. I guess that is at the heart of what we do, as moms to be that space for them to freely love. What a blessing to be a mom!!!

 My husband bought me a new guitar, and it sounds so good!!!!  I got to share my new song that I wrote about the trees here in Georgia, called Into the World.

 It's a Martin 000-28 Eric Clapton Acoustic...

A Dream Set Free 

Saturday Afternoon

Let your dreams become reality!

On this day, August 8, I witnessed a dream of mine, set free ~ writing a song with friends.

I was surrounded by love, beauty, freedom, friends, as time stood still long enough to write this song.

We hope you enjoy it!

Here is the moment we completed the song and we captured our practice performance.

The plan was to sing it for everyone that evening at the Saturday Night Sharing.

Thank you for stopping by today!

Check out Part 5 Now

A Dream Set Free 

The Essence of Taproot

 Part 1 was brainstorming and coming up with verse 1

Part 2 was coming up with verse 2 the next day out in nature

This is Part 3 the essence of Taproot Teacher Training

[Me, Jodie Mesler and Jean Miller]

In this blog post, I want give you a feel of A Dream Set Free, which is a very important part of songwriting. What is the collective feeling of this time together?

[Our small group, moms with kids 1st-3rd grade]

Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf Education, states,

"We look at a painting and see beauty, with music we become beauty...

in the sculptural and pictorial realm we look at beauty, and we live it;

in the musical realm we ourselves become beauty...but in music humans themselves are the creators.

What they create does not come from what is already there, but lays the foundation and firm ground for what is to arise in the future."

The songwriting vision I had before I got to Taproot was...

Do you enjoy celebrating St. Patrick’s Day like we do?

We have enjoyed St. Patrick’s Day ever since our first son was born on March 16, 2001.

Turning 21, is quite a milestone, so I asked him if he wanted to go to an Irish Pub for his birthday, he said that would be awful!

Instead of going to a bar, he asked us all to go to Pine Mountain and go hiking with him. I guess all those daily walks during our homeschool days paid off, even in the cold, icy, and wet days.

When my kids were little, we always celebrated by wearing green, hunting for 4-leafed clovers, and making a festive snack. 

Here is Bella when she was in 3rd grade.

Wanna do this with your family? Just take a piece of bread, spread some peanut butter on it, then take a banana and cut 4 coin slices. Now stick the bananas on the bread to make a 4 leaf clover, then sprinkle with green sugar. Repeat ever year, lol! 

What are you and your kids doing for this festive green week? I would love to hear...

I love having you here! Thank you for being apart of my musical journey! I love all of you, my friends and family! And this is a great time to send you all

     LOVE     

My sister, Jenny and I love  Valentine's Day for this very reason!!

 She loves it so much that she just name her new baby, Valen. He is a precious baby boy. She really wanted to name him Valentine, but she couldn't talk her husband into it! But I think Valen is a great name.

I have a free song for you, with the chord and lyric chart, called I  Love You So.

My cousin, Jamey and I wrote it together. It is a cute song to sing with your kids around this time of year.

He has a son that is 5 years old, named Oden and I am teaching him music lessons each week. I sing this to him all the time. It's his song, because....

This song was written 6 years ago, before Oden was born (I am pretty sure it was about Oden's mama).

I played the piano part for...

You can watch this festive December flute lesson in action from this week at my house. 

I currently have the beautiful opportunity to teach my nieces, Alyssa and Alori, private music lessons. It’s great because they are perfect ages to begin learning an instrument.

Alyssa is learning piano, she is 7 years old and Alori is learning the pennywhistle and she is 6 years old.

Alori is on Lesson 7 of The Magic Flute Course, which follows the seasons nicely, as we make our way through the Christmas season.

I have Alyssa learning the songs from Playful Pentatonic Piano. After only 8 piano lessons, she is already advanced to Playful Pentatonic Piano 2 and is on the song My Horses Ain’t Hungry.

We are all enjoying it so much! I love how much they light up when it is so very playful.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of Year! Above is a video I made for a fun giveaway, check out our winner

Full of happy tunes that you can’t help singing from all the joy in the atmosphere.

One of the best ways to get through the colder and darker days is with music.

Do you or your kids have a musical instrument that you can easily play?

Do you have easy music to sing and play during this festive time?

 I want to help you get what you need for this season.

 The pennywhistle is one of the easiest starter instruments I have ever played. It is also known as the tinwhistle.

It has such a sweet, whispery tone and sounds beautiful.

I taught my kids to play it, and they loved it!

One of my most memorable performances was with my daughter and my students on Away in the Manger. She and my student played the ukulele and I played the pennywhistle and we all sang the three verses mixed with ukulele and pennywhistle. Everyone loved it! The kids sounded so sweet and so cute,...