Past projects 6
The Perfect Musical Tool for Students With Disabilities!
Funded Jan 9, 2025Thank you so much to contributing to my Donor's Choose project. The addition of the Roland sample pad to my classroom will be a great enhancement to our classroom technology. In addition, it will serve as a great adaptive device for students with physical disabilities and will allow them to fully engage in all music making activities. I am very excited to share this phenomenal equipment with me students. The students at the Wang Middle School and I are very grateful to you!
My sincerest best wishes,
David Grenier”
With gratitude,
Mr. Grenier
Students Are Buzzing About Mr. Grenier's Music Class!
Funded Sep 25, 2024Having a classroom set of pBuzz instruments has greatly expanded the range of musical skills that my students are able to practice in my classroom. All of my students now have the opportunity to develop the fundamental skills required for playing a broad range of brass and wind instruments. The pBuzz has been a fun and rewarding tool for teaching and learning. It is brilliantly designed so that students play popular tunes within minutes.
I work with students in grades 5 through 8. Typically, 8th graders are more reserved than my younger students and are a little bit more tentative about expressing themselves creatively. But the brightness and simplicity of the pBuzz instruments was very inviting to my students in each grade level. As soon as they discovered how to produce a pitch, students played and explored without inhibitions. Before the end of a class period, kids were playing "We Will Rock You," holiday melodies, and even creating their own original tunes with humor and joy.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Grenier
This classroom project was brought to life by The Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation and 20 other donors.Microphones for Young Songwriters
Funded Sep 27, 2022My students and I are very thankful for your contributions to our music classroom. Having high quality USB microphones will give my students the opportunity to write and record songs that express their unique experiences as young people in our highly diverse school community. They will record songs that are close to their hearts. This will not only be a profound personal experience for them. It will also be of great educational value, at the intersection of literacy, music, and technology.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Grenier
Music Instruction and Modern Tech!
Funded Aug 14, 2019This will be the first year that middle school students at the STEM Academy will have music class. Our eighth graders having had music class since they were in grade 4. They are excited for what’s ahead, but I think they can only begin to imagine the possibilities. My goal is to engage them in a rewarding creative experience that ties in meaningfully to the STEM mission of our school. As we build this new program, your gift will make it possible for our students to engage in an interactive learning experience in which each student is provided the building blocks that they need to learn to play, create, share, and study music in the world around them. On behalf of our school community and 850 grateful students, I want to thank you for your generosity. It means a lot to me.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Grenier
This classroom project was brought to life by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and 13 other donors.Music Education for the 21st Century
Funded Oct 9, 2018My students and I are very grateful for the technology that we now have in my music classroom, thanks to your generosity. Just as with Math, English Language Arts, or any other subject area, students encounter barriers to proficiency in music. Given that our school has a large proportion of English Language Learners and students with a variety of special needs, the challenges may involve language gaps, spatial reasoning, attention deficits, and auditory processing, to name a few things. But having an interactive display helps us overcome many of those barriers together.
I saw one example of the effectiveness of the interactive display when I began teaching my students to compose guitar tablature. Tablature is a system of notation that guitarists and composers use for writing down their music. It involves numbers and lines that can seem very abstract if the teacher can only talk about them and show pictures. But the interactive display allows us to create tablature by physically placing the numbers on the lines. That process creates a concrete connection between the music you write and the music you play.
Prior to the holidays my students used the GarageBand app on iPads to perform seasonal music. With the interactive system we can use the classroom whiteboard as a touch screen. So I was able to model the process of preparing and performing holiday songs in just the same way that I expected students to do it. That allowed us to quickly access the richness and enjoyment of music and technology.
With each lesson that I create, my students and I explore the possibilities that our projector and interactive display open up for us. We are very thankful.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Grenier
Ukuleles for Everyone
Funded Oct 2, 2017I see nearly 350 students per week in my music classes at the Robinson School. The students range from grades 5-8. Our new ukuleles are played in nearly every class, every single day. In the coming semester, the other 350 students will also learn to play the ukulele. When the ukuleles arrived, our children were very honored to play instruments that were lovingly purchased just for them.
My students have grown as musicians through the ukulele in this semester. Initially my classes played and sang along with some of their favorite popular songs such as "Shake it Off," by Taylor Swift, "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz, and "Best Day of My Life," by American Authors. Because the ukulele is such a user friendly instrument no matter the size of the player's fingers, kids in each grade were quickly able to master several chords. Now many of my students are writing original songs. They are applying musical concepts that they learned through the ukulele, and composing pieces that include keyboard, bass, guitar, drums and of course, the ukulele.
Your generosity has even inspired many of my colleagues. We meet every Friday after school for a faculty ukulele club. It is always a joyful and relaxing time. We practice a wide range of songs together and were recently joined by a community ukulele group, "The Uke-ladies." The faculty club entertained our students and families at this year's winter concert with a rendition of "Mele Kalikimaka, The Hawaiian Christmas Carol." Several students and faculty told me that a ukulele was on their holiday wish list for this year.
My hope is that in the spring several of my student groups will perform a recital if their original works. I look forward to sharing their artistic achievements with you. The Robinson community is grateful to you for sharing the joy and the rewards of music with our students.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Grenier