New Site Launch!

Welcome to the new website for Kindermusik With Charlotte! Our old site was really just a placeholder until we could find the time to put together something decent. Time certainly hasn't made itself available, but sometimes you have to hunker down and put everything aside for a weekend. Please do us a favor and let us know if you find any errors popping up! Since the site has grown pretty significantly from the old version, we've put together some links to help get you up to speed on where information is located.

Get Oriented!

Scheduling Information

Our Kindermusik schedule can be rather daunting to communicate to people, so we've tried to make it easy for you by letting you view it in several different formats. Use the links below to get started:

• View class schedule by age group
• View class schedule by day of the week
• View class schedule by location
• View class schedule by course name

Curricula, Courses, and Meetings, Oh My!

The Kindermusik course structure vocabulary can be quite overwhelming. Here's some information to help you navigate the structure:

1. Kindermusik Curricula are kind of like "grade levels" in school. Each curriculum is an age-specific group of courses. When you were in 12th grade, for example, you took different courses from when you were in 11th grade. Similarly, the Kindermusik Village Curriculum contains age-specific courses that differ from those in the Our Time Curriculum.
2. Kindermusik Courses are all of the different course programs that are taught to your child. Continuing with the school metaphor, courses are kind of like "subjects." Based on your child's age, he or she may participate in several different courses, just like you might have taken Math, Science, and Art within the same grade level.
3. Kindermusik Class Meetings are the physical meetings in which the courses are taught (and for which you sign up and attend). Once again with the school metaphor, class meetings are kind of like classes at school. As you'll remember, Math 101 was available several times during the day, but it was always the same class. Similarly, a course may be taught at different locations and on different days, but it's always the same class.

That all makes perfect sense, right!? Easy as cake? If you're still confused, please feel free to contact Charlotte at any time. Additionally, here's a list of all the Kindermusik curricula and a list of all the courses on this website.

Enrollment!

How do you sign up for a class? Easy! Just click the Enroll button on any page to be taken to the enrollment page. You'll be able to download a Word document to fill out and submit to Charlotte.

About the Site Development

As mentioned above, the old website served as a placeholder until we had the time to devote to fleshing it out into a "real" site. Hopefully the shock of moving from plainness to content-heavy won't be too overwhelming for those of you who have gotten used to the old version. For the technologically-interested, this site was programmed in Ruby under the Rails framework. The content is housed in a 16-table MySQL database and is managed entirely by a custom-built content management system. The design and development was performed in a 6-day, caffeine-heavy marathon session by Charlotte's son, Justin, who manages Meticulous Design Group out of Washington D.C. and Virginia Beach. After however-many years, he finally got sick of the overhead required by each new schedule's deployment and put in the elbow grease to automate it properly. There's more information (but not much!) available here.