When we were kids and had to buy recorders to play in music class, did you ever think that your dollar fifty would have been better invested in, say, a couple of boxes of Runts or Sprees from one of those junior high kids who were selling them all the time for 50 cents a pop? Yeah, me too. As much as I love (and loved) music and singing, I always thought that plain old “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder was one of the dullest things I was ever forced to learn (remember, “B,A,G,A… A, B, B!”?). See, even now the notes haunt me, and I neither like the song nor the instrument. (Don’t get me wrong; I love folk music and play a mean turtle-shaped-flute-thingy.)

But you know what? It doesn’t have to be this way. I know this because I’ve bought a recorder for my daughter (she’s five and on her third one, actually; apparently in addition to music they make great experiment items to be stuffed with play-dough, paint brushes, and other odds and ends, or simply broken…) and she happens to love the thing. She is interested in learning how to hold her fingers over the holes to make different sounds, as well as knowing why this actually works in the first place. She plays along with the songs on her CD player, attempting to sound like the songs she hears each day, and she actually enjoys handling the thing.

Of course, I didn’t teach her to play the way I was taught; instead of making her learn notes that were pretty much meaningless to her, or teach her a weird song about baked good that she didn’t really relate to (I’ve still never had a hot cross bun to this day, though it sounds more like a fetishist hairstyle than a pastry to me) I let her play with the thing. Yes, she went through a couple of them before she really got into it, but that was more of my fault than her own, since I let her have recorder at a very early age. The point is that without a bunch of cajoling on my own part, she was willing to play an instrument just for the fun of it—which is how learning should be anyway.

Maybe my kid just likes the recorder; there have been weirder things reported on this planet, after all. But maybe playing the recorder really is an important part of learning—as playing music should always be included in a child’s life, for sure, with stress on that first word, playing.