Kaleea, I love the "hoity-toity" stuff when it comes to music and singing! I love thinking about the universality of it all- beyond cultural scales and musical styles, there's this primal universality that still can be found in the playground and on the school bus- and the basketball court and the sports arena- that's just cool!!

I teach elementary music and the Kodaly method, (which I touch on but am not certified in) always begins in the earliest grades with the sol-mi interval- adding "la", working up to a pentatonic scale, and only introducing the "western" diatonic tones in the middle grades. The theory being that this is the natural progression of the developing child's ability to hear, learn, and sing.

Allison