Has it been hard for you to know what to do with so many hours in the day inside your house? This might be great news for kids or those who have children around the age of 8 to 15. A Rigby couple has started providing free online music classes for children. They started with the idea when Tanner Christensen’s town in Washington started struggling with COVID-19.
“This originally started out as offering just free music classes during the COVID-19 for my hometown but it just kind of took off and we have hundreds and hundreds of people shared our post,” Christensen said.
After Tanner and his wife Maggie shared on their personal Facebook accounts that they were going to be doing the online music classes hundreds of people shared the post and it became a lot bigger than what they expected. Their first class on Zoom, which only allows 100 people to join on a free account, got maxed out with 100 people in the first 30 seconds. The Christensens aren’t sure how long they’ll keep this up.
“We’ve kind of said while we are in quarantine, but I guess we can just do it as long as people are interested,” said Maggie.
Tanner and Maggie are both professional performers and are passionate about music. Maggie grew up doing theatre and music, her parents own a theatre in West Yellowstone, so the performing arts have always been a part of her life. Tanner, on the other hand, grew up playing sports and got into performing only a few years ago. Even though they haven’t studied to be teachers they love children and want to help them understand how music can be a tool to share our emotions.
“Our basis is performance and courage and joy,” Tanner said.
They teach basic vocal and acting techniques. They want the students who are having their first experience taking classes for performing arts to have a positive experience and feel a joy for acting, singing and performing.
“Really helping those students understand that through music is a great way to express emotion, express feeling,” Tanner said.
After the classes, the Christensens can send videos to the students so they can receive individual feedback so they can all improve as performers. Classes are every Wednesday at 11 a.m. Mountain Time and you can get the information about the Zoom link or the Facebook Live on Tanner’s Facebook, which you can check by clicking here.