Funded Dec 18, 2023This has been a phenomenal year of musical learning for our PreK students. With your help, we obtained class sets of various percussion instruments to lead hands-on musical lessons. Already, they have practiced musical skills on both boomwhackers and handbells!
Many of the students have already learned to recognize musical rhythmic notation as well and to connect it to the fine motor movement required to play their instruments. It is amazing to witness a four-year-old child see written notation with a quarter note, a quarter rest, and four eighth notes, to hear that small kiddo say "Beet, SHHH, Cher-ry, Cher-ry" with obvious understanding, and to begin playing it as easy as reading their own name.
Before this gift, we were using any free virtual resources we could find. Although it is awesome these resources are free, the kiddos were much more excited to hold an REAL musical instrument and to hear, for themselves, that with their own hands, they could create music.
Our next step is to work up to the more complicated instruments (instruments with smaller spaces to strike and many pitches to choose from) like the xylophone and the keyboards. By the end of the year, the oldest pre-K students will be playing a C-Major scale on the keyboards.”
With gratitude,
Mr. B