Meet Mozart

How can we expect our children to learn to love great music if we never introduce it? Here is a quick way to give your kids a splash of knowledge about Mozart and to give them a glimpse of the world’s more refined things:

Meet Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart = Put a picture of Mozart on the table before dinner, play Mozart’s music during dinner, and give a short synopsis of Mozart’s life (or tell one story about him). Then you are finished. It is that simple.

To prepare:

- Check out a book or look up information on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I love to check out a few books with different reading levels. I set them on the couch a few days previous to the dinner. You’d be surprised how often one of my kids will be found reading or at least looking through the books. I generally read one of the biographies, but if time is short a synopsis from the internet is perfect. I jot down a bit of information…not so much that it is a speech, but enough that it sparks interest. It takes less than 5 minutes to teach the “splash” of knowledge during dinner. If your children are old enough, you may want to have one of them teach about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (We have done a similar thing with many of the great people from history. See our post: Who’s Invited to Dinner.)

Search “free coloring page Mozart.” Print the page and let one of your kids color it. Put it in a plastic page protector and tape it to a box to hold it up. The picture I used is found here.
Find a sample of Mozart’s music on the internet. Save the location so you can quickly get to it and play it during dinner.

We can make a conscience effort to make sure we teach some of the best things to our children. Introducing classical music will benefit them.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell said: “We . . . live in a world that is too prone to the tasteless, and we need to provide an opportunity to cultivate a taste for the finest music. And, likewise, we’re in a world that’s so attuned to the now that we need to permit people to be more attuned to the best music of all the ages.” As quoted in Your Refined Heavenly Home by Douglas A. Callister