THE FLUTEPLAY STORY
as told by our creator, Stéphanie Superle
Hello & welcome to FlutePlay! We are a community of early childhood music educators who all specialize in teaching young kids how to play the flute. It is our goal to elevate the exposure of early childhood flute education so that the flute is readily available and viewed as one of the top three instruments to start young children in music lessons! With new kid-friendly instruments, handy teaching tools, incredible resources, and our expertise with little flutes and little people, learning the flute from a young age hasn't been so fun, so easy, and so affordable. How did we get here? Let me tell you:
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Stéphanie Superle. I'm a Canadian flutist with a passion for teaching little people the flute! Working with young children is what motivates and inspires me every single day. I've been drawn to working and playing with kids my entire life and despite my best efforts to explore other career paths, it was only natural that I was always drawn back to education and little people.
During my undergraduate degree, I took as many elementary music classes as I could to earn a double specialty in elementary and secondary music. I learned about valuable teaching methods like Orff and Kodály. I gained valuable experience teaching and planning lessons for little ones. In my final year, I spent 4 months teaching music in a K-12 school. Let me tell you, with 24 six-year-olds in a room at once and all eyes on you, you learn classroom management super quick!
After completing my undergraduate degree, I decided to continue with my performance ambitions. I taught casually, subbing for colleagues here and there but all focus was on my own learning and performance. I graduated with my masters in flute performance and began performing and teaching across the Greater Toronto Area. My desire to teach young kids again was strong and suddenly I began teaching music classes to kids as young as three and led summer programs to kids aged 4-8. I developed new curriculum for a local music school to expand their programs from 3 years to senior kindergarten and even started a couple of young enthusiastic kids on piccolo because they were too small to hold a full flute!
In 2015, after seeing all the incredible resources developed by Kathy Blocki, I decided to travel down to Pittsburgh to take the Kinderflute Teacher Certification Course. I completed my Kinderflute certification and became the first certified Kinderflute teacher in Canada! But that is just the beginning...
Creating a new path is exciting and inspiring and lonely and frustrating all at the same time. In the early days I found myself longing to connect with other like-minded educators who were doing that same thing I was trying to do. Slowly but surely, I began connecting with teachers, building relationships, and creating my own small village. Fast forward to 2019 and I found myself connecting one-on-one with my colleagues sometimes on a weekly basis. I began envisioning a place where we could ALL be connected. A place where we could dive into all the flute method books and where we could use our expertise to create resources for families and teachers alike.
It took years of trial and error, empty classrooms, full classes, making new connections, building a community, and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to come up with a new concept for teachers, families, and the future of early childhood flute education but I believe we're finally here. Welcome to FlutePlay - where community, creativity, and collaboration meets #allthingslittleflutes.