Past projects 4
Beautiful Voices & Learning Walls Motivate Life-long Love of Music!
Funded Oct 26, 2022Thank you so much for your kind and generous donations! My students are going to be so excited to see our classroom transformed! Students will learn about music concepts and our posters will reinforce that learning every day. I can't wait to share these improvements to my classroom to my students - thanks to all of you! Again, thank you!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Kochel
This classroom project was brought to life by Panda Cares and 9 other donors.Preserving Our Musical Heritage: Ukuleles and Folk Music!
Funded Dec 31, 2021Last semester my 4th grade students worked so hard to learn ukulele. Unfortunately, their efforts were not accurately represented by our performance due to our classroom ukuleles being so old the tuning pegs were broken (and continued breaking) and many instruments could no longer hold a tune, the bodies were coming apart and the bridges kept falling off. When students wanted to practice outside of class time, we hadn't any cases to transport them home. It was so disappointing!
This semester things are so different! Thanks to your donations, we have new ukuleles, tuners, and cases! My students get to spend their class time learning and making music, instead of fighting to get and keep the ukuleles in tune! Students are taking the instruments home, too! In fact, three students wrote songs with their ukuleles and will be entering them in a contest! The energy in our class is now positive and dynamic!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Kochel
Music Can Change the World, Because It Can Change People
Funded Nov 23, 2020Thank you for your donations. We now have a class room set of 12 guitars! We learned basic guitar in middle school music last term. We begin learning guitar in 5th grade music this year, even playing guitars during our winter concert.
My students have been so excited to be learning guitar. They are at the age where they, especially the boys, begin to lose interest in music. The guitars rekindled their interest!
In the future, I plan to expand our program, teaching guitar in 5th and 6th grade. I hope to have an out of class time guitar club. I also plan to provide several opportunities for performance as well.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Kochel
This classroom project was brought to life by Allstate Foundation and 4 other donors.Build a Musical Library!
Funded Mar 13, 2020Literacy is important to any field of study. Last fall, I was at a teacher training that advocated reading aloud to students of all ages, right up to 12th grade. So I started reading music related books: picture books, biographies, funny books etc. to all my students grades 5 - 12. Unfortunately, we didn't have very many books on topic in our school library. That's about the time I found Donors Choose. I read books that teach a topic, but also some of the books I read with no ulterior motive when we were stressed or needed a break. I was pleasantly surprised at how much my students liked it! I also chose one or two days a month for reading. I usually start by reading a short book or passage. Then the students can choose a book to read, look at on their own.
One of the first books I used was "Ada's Violin." Ada lives in Paraguay on top of a garbage dump. Her community was able to pull together a recycled orchestra with all the instruments made out of scavenged materials. Eventually they were able to play all over the world. The first day of the unit I created for Jr. High General Music, we read the book and planned out a recycled instrument we could make. Then we divided into groups of 3 - 4 students and chose one project to complete in our group. They compiled a list of materials needed, found those materials and built the instrument. Ideally the instruments would play, however with varying degrees of success. I really loved how this project touched on so many ideas. The book described the extreme poverty where Ada lived, how her community made a living by scavenging trash, overcoming hardship, volunteering, creativity, logical thought process, cooperative learning and more. I will continue to develop learning units like this for other books.
Another area where I see so much value to my students is for the books to be a source of calmness and learning. The books give students who are not actively engaged in playing to still be learning. Students can come and choose a book and sit and read when their day is overwhelming.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Kochel
This classroom project was brought to life by A group of anonymous donors and 9 other donors.