The Musical Six-Stringed Road to Expressive Language
Help me give my students a real connection to something they will not get anywhere else: hands-on musical skills. No knob-twiddling, desktop production, but beautiful acoustic guitars to learn how to play music in the classic sense!
$990 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
Our students are a rare breed of sincerely sweet children who unfortunately have limited experience and resources in their lives.
Nowhere is this more visible than in their unfortunately poor skills in the expressive language.
They struggle across the board, and they struggle to work together to solve problems and seek strength in mutual support. The majority of our students' class time is a matter of remediating their undeveloped skills, by working in small groups to focus on their individual levels and appeal to their individual motivation. Some of them have little to no motivation because they have been exposed to so little in their lives, or cannot maintain pursuing their interests.
As teachers - we are happy to constantly evaluate our methods for reaching each student and improving their lives in the most profound sense.
My Project
These guitars are literally the key to multiple skillsets in which our students have deficits; motor skills, social skills and expressive language skills. They experience limited cognitive stimulation in their home lives that allow them to build and develop these skills as profoundly as music would allow.
"Where words fail, music speaks." So said Hans Christian Andersen.
Plato wrote, "Music gives...wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” These guitars will be what is hopefully only the doorway to realizing the expansiveness of their mind, and their imagination. These guitars will be a catalyst for building community amongst children through learning and making music together - that bond that is impossible to put into words, and a bond that is sorely lacking from their lives. As an ensemble, they will develop their skills, work together and play together in ways that will only encourage deeper ties between them, and beyond the music.
The actual coordination and mathematical thinking will sharpen their minds the way a number talk does - by offering them new perspectives on complex relationships between their senses, their bodies and their physical world. Their confidence will soar when they reap the benefits of practicing something that inspires them, and when they feel how it inspires their audience.
With this motivation, I hope my students take the first step into the world beyond their limited experience. I hope that this inspires a lifelong pursuit, if not of music, of expressiveness and interconnectedness that leads to positively impacting their future selves, and their communities. Yes, I do believe these guitars can ignite that lifelong inspiration to find something greater than what they might be limited to at home...by finding the "wings to the minds."
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Berman and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
