2013-531 Arts - Chapel Hill-Carrboro Public School for Fall 2013- Art Grant Agreement $1,500

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The kids have learned to play at least 15 songs.They have learned how to listen to chords and chord changes and to improvise with the chords they know. I highly encouraged them to just play with the sounds guitars can make and find sounds they like and can use. Sometimes, we made up new words to known songs just for fun.A favorite activity in guitar class was to play a game like Red Light, Green Light. When I said green light,everybody got to jam like a rock star,when I said red light they had to stop immediately.My goal was to get them to improvise in a fun,unselfconscious way. The children absolutely want to learn more about guitar.Playing guitar and being a musician has become an important part of who they are.There are three students who are being redistricted and they have already found out about music at their new school. They have discovered that everyone learns guitar in fifth grade. They don't want to wait that long so they invited me to move to their new school with them! The kids are helping each other and their friends at home to learn more chords and strumming patterns. Please summarize the results of this project Please refer to your application to report back on the evaluation piece as you described it in=lying for the grant(attach panes as needed): This was a highly successful project and I plan to teach another guitar group next year. The students in my group included three refugee children and two African American children.Three of the five students are special education students. The children developed a strong and clear sense of community through this group.They love identifying as musicians. I believe that all of them developed a strong sense of belonging at school. One child in particular learned,through guitar and music,that school can be a place to succeed and to be happy and purposeful. All of the students in this group are also children who have needed extra support to learn to read.Reading lyrics proved to be a fun and painless way to practice literacy. Music is inherently mathematical.The children learned to count beats,measures and rests.They learned to understand how the fingerboard is structured like a graph.They learned about chord structure.