Author and Founder of Animal Adventures in Music, Jessica Schatz, has been working in the music education industry for the majority of her life. She started teaching piano lessons when she was 15 years old and hasn’t stopped since. As her music school developed in the last decade, Jessica has been constantly experimenting with how to bring music education into people’s lives as early as possible. She brought various group and mommy-and-me type classes to her school to offer to toddlers and preschoolers. While these classes are effective and valuable for various reasons, she found that she was facing the same frustrating experiences over and over again. Basically, a group of toddlers all in one class managed by one teacher can be a little crazy. Kids learn at different rates, have different learning styles, and have different preferences when it comes to games, structure, and communication.

So Jessica decided to take matters into her own hands and write a curriculum of her own that could be customized for any group of students and is super flexible. She put together a comprehensive teaching program that promotes crazy levels of motivation, encourages rapid growth for students, and also engages parents in a hands-on and fun way. The curriculum takes students from zero music theory knowledge to knowing how to read 21 different notes on a staff, composing rhythms using sixteenth through whole notes and rests, and applying musical symbols like fermatas, repeat signs, crescendos and decrescendos in just over a year. Oh, and it teaches them the basics of 10 different instruments from a variety of different instrument families. Oh, AND she wrote the 10 levels for this program AND an extensive teaching guide in just under 2 weeks. Needless to say, it was a labor of love.

Her program (then called Level Up Junior) was successfully operating in group classes at her 5 music school locations in Michigan for about a year before she realized just how impactful it was. Young students were graduating from this program with an extremely firm grasp on music theory that she had never seen before. Her teachers were reporting that “Level Up Junior Graduates” were their favorite students to receive and that they LOVED teaching them private lessons because they could jump right into the fun stuff: teaching their students (some as young as 4 years old) how to play actual songs on an instrument. Level Up Junior became the feeder program that Jessica never knew she was missing. Teachers loved it, students loved it, and parents loved it.

There was only one problem…

The curriculum was SO plain. It was rich in content but bland in design. It didn’t excite students (in fact, sometimes it overwhelmed them) and it was a lot to take in… physically! 2 to 6 year olds were carrying around 3-ring-binders holding hundreds of pages of documentation! Was it adorable to see a 3 year old walk in holding a binder half their size? Yes. Was it workable long-term? No.

That’s where Joann and Mo came in…

Now that you’ve got the origin stories, let’s get into the good stuff…

On January 28th of 2020, Jessica sat Mo and Joann down and told them that she wanted them to “revamp the Level Up Junior program”. She explained her goals: make it pretty, make it publishable, and share it with the world.

Mo’s first response was, “Hey, what if we made it all about animals?” They started drawing Petey a couple weeks later and the rest of the adorable crew came to life shortly thereafter. They dreamt up their personalities and characteristics and tied it all together with an individualized fashion accessory for each of them. Joann got to work rethinking the layout, separating the content into easy-to-read chapters, integrating fun and creative activities into the teacher guide, and rewriting the curriculum to fit into a new, modernized format. Goals were set, publishing houses were contacted, and Mo and Joann worked around the clock rewriting and restructuring the Level Up Junior program into a series of books. Jessica served as the subject-matter-expert, voice of reason, and steady hand very much needed to bring structure to the creative energy overflowing from Joann and Mo.

6 months later, 10 books and a teacher guide were written. 671 pages were illustrated and designed, and 58 pages of stickers were created. A vocalist and songwriter was hired to write a custom song for Level 10, flashcards were created for 3 octaves of notes, and ISBNs were registered. A custom music staff rug was designed, custom medals were dreamed up, commissioned, and created, and 17 different posters were drawn up and sent to the printer. Ideas were proposed, discussed, and integrated into the program. It was a thrilling and non-stop journey of brainstorming, ideation, and action.

And now, we’re able to share it all with you. The goal of this program was to create something that was as beautiful and enticing as it was effective, and we believe wholeheartedly that we’ve achieved that. We couldn’t be prouder of what we’ve built and can’t wait to see the little ones in your community enjoying it as much as we do.

Love and happy vibes,

Jessica, Joann and Mo