Songs of peace could be heard faintly outside the walls of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church this week as South Coast Music Together held a series of off-season classes.

Brought to the public in 1987, Music Together is an international organization that provides young children an informal musical immersion experience.

“As a culture, we’ve turned music over to performance, meaning that we think that people who have talent can make music. We forget that it is a skill that we acquire,” said music instructor Rhonda Matson.

Matson started the region’s branch of Music Together in 2003. She said she’s held classes across the region, but currently holds classes in Marion, Westport and New Bedford. Her primary location is at St. Peter’s in Dartmouth.

The organization holds three, 10-week sessions in the fall, winter and spring as well as an eight-week session in the summer. Because December tends to be a busy month for parents, the group usually takes the month off. However, this past week Music Together offered special sessions throughout the week called the Peace Party.

Children and their guardians banged on drums, clapped rhythmically and paraded around the front of the church to song.

“What we’re teaching is musicality,” Matson said. “We want people to understand that music comes from your body first. Children learn music like they learn language – through little bite-sized pieces and through a lot of repetition and exposure.”

Music Together offers a curriculum held across nine sessions or seasons. Parents are given a songbook with about 25 songs and CDs to practice at home.

The classes are intended to be a first step for children to learn music. Rhonda said that if parents hope their child will one day pursue a formal musical education, early exposure to musical concepts is key.

“If children have a poor vocabulary environment, they would develop a poor vocabulary,” said Matson, adding that the same rule applies to music.

Her classes give students the chance to create music themselves and add and remove the lyrics from songs so that they can understand the basic rhythm.

“You keep immersing them in the musical experience, and they will acquire the skill,” she said. “If you expose your child to that, they will take from this musical buffet what they need.”

The next session at South Coast Music Together will begin on Jan. 6. The group will also be performing during the Padanaram Christmas Festival on Dec. 4. For more information on the organization, visit southcoastmt.com.