Affiliate links included at no cost to you. All thoughts and opinions are my own. I have no relationship with the company who makes Compose Yourself.

One of the absolute coolest things my girls got for Christmas last year was something they didn’t ask for, and something that I didn’t even know existed. It’s an interactive music game for kids and it teaches music writing. It’s called Compose Yourself and in a nutshell, it is awesome.

Currently priced at just $14.99, your purchase gets you a set of 60 musical cards and a code that allows you to hear those cards played out online by an orchestra.

Children can create their own compositions by arranging 4, 8, 12 or 16 cards together. Each card actually has 4 different arrangements on it, as the bar of notes can be inverted or flipped upside-down. My girls totally loved hearing how the same 4 notes could sound when played in a different order. After they created their compositions, they would spend time flipping around different cards or switching out the order, realizing that by making these seemingly minor tweaks, they could have a dramatic effect on the overall feel of the piece.

After you have composed a piece to your satisfaction, you can share your piece via email or social networks (we shared 2 pieces on Facebook, already) and you can also download your piece to your computer to keep forever. If your child is currently studying an instrument, you can print sheet music so that your child can practice performing his or her works.

All this, once again, for just under $15. I think it is an incredible deal, and it’s at a price point that I like to hover around for birthday gifts for friends.

Compose Yourself is not something we knew about, but we are SO glad that a family member did and picked it up for us. Now we are having so much fun exploring the world of music and writing our own music. Memory, language, social skills, creative thinking and expression are all positively impacted by the presence of music in a child’s life, and this has been one of the coolest ways we’ve seen to add music in a way that is interactive.