Its taken us a long time – much longer than we initially expected, but we can finally announce the winners of our Preschool Song Competition which we ran earlier this year.

We had over 300 entries to this competition, and the quality of the entries were quite amazing. For this reason we had planned to choose only 20 winners, but we ended up choosing 24!

The way this competition works is that there isn’t really a ‘first prize’ and ‘second prize’ we just gave composers the opportunity to submit as many songs as they wanted, and each song that is chosen wins a prize of $100, and inclusion in our preschool program.

So commiserations and thanks to all those who submitted songs that weren’t chosen. We did print out each and every song, and we had meetings around the piano with the development team to go through them.

We found a great many songs that were extremely well written….but just too complicated for a preschool audience. In a preschool class what you need are extremely simple lyrics, that are easy to remember, and lots of repetition.

So well done to everyone who submitted entries. Lots of them would win a normal songwriting contest, as they were very well written.. but they weren’t suitable for the preschool market.

We may run similar competitions in the future for older students, and we would encourage those same composers to enter the same songs – as some might win for older children.

So… here are the winning composers!

Carol Troutman Wiggins
Jodi Jansen
Rosalie Karalekas
Jill Hanon
Valerie Smalkin
Lucy Patterson
Kimberley Luke
Mary Jane Jones

Just so you can see the concept of simplicity required for preschool music – we have decided to share with you the opening few lines of one of the winning songs. This is ‘circle fun’ by Carol Troutman Wiggins. It is basically an 8 Bar melody.. no more, and it is very repetitive. There is easy to understand actions that three or four year olds will understand, and do along with the class.

CircleFun_sample
We are very fortunate and lucky to have found such amazing songwriters to come up with these brilliant ideas….. and we really can’t wait until the product is available for you.

Like all our products however, we won’t give an exact time-frame for completion. This is because we need to give our expert writer all the time she needs to complete the lesson plans, then we need time for an adequate review process to test it in the classroom first, just so we really know that activities actually work in practice.

We’re also getting some amazing musicians involved to create high quality backing tracks, plus singers to produce brilliant recordings.

There will also be a training component with hopefully all these songs recorded on video, so you’ll be able to SEE how the actions will work and learn them easily.

If you are teaching preschool regularly and would like to be a part of the testing process, then feel free to get in touch with us, and we will let you know if any of the spots in our beta testing program are still available.