Infuse U.S. Classrooms with Music for Learning!

Hey, there, Supporters!

Thank you so much for being the wind beneath our wings in Los Angeles schools last month! As you might remember, we were able to begin training teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—the second largest school district in the country—last year with your help. We started with the music educators, training them on ukulele and songwriting- and many are now including ukuleles in their regular K-5 music classes.

Why did we start there? Because we were fortunate enough to be asked to do this by music educator Ellie Wong and the amazing folks who run arts education for the district, Christopher Rodriguez, Steven McCarthy and Rory Pullens. They were specifically interested in helping get more music integrated into the general classrooms and in helping music teachers make vital connections to English Language Arts. That is the best possible thing for students.

It has now happened and in a remarkable way. The top banana in music, Christopher Rodriguez was talking one day to his colleague in charge of English Language Learning for Early Childhood Education in the district, Ms. Lourdes "Leti" Puyol and she explained that she wanted to find a way to train her huge faculty to help transitional kinder (TK) students in the district (thousands of them) to read with music. Her hope was to create a really fun inroad to literacy for them- something that would let them be little kids.She wanted to preserve the spirit of play in their young lives as opposed to expecting them to behave like older students.

Chris jumped on the opportunity to bring GITC into the English Language Arts (ELA) department with Leti and we were off and running. Leti understands that four year olds are not six year olds. They need freedom to invent, to move about, change focus frequently, dress up, make a mess, make things with their hands. They are not first graders who can sit in a desk and hold a pencil. Singing and strumming ukuleles is just perfect for them. Especially when we pair it up with learning letters, sounds and little words.

Together, we were able to build a 3 hour workshop for 25-30 teachers at a time to prepare them to infuse their lessons with music in order to boost imagination, learning, language skills and memory while making school a place where their young students want to be each day.

So just last month, we trained 110 transitional Kindergarten teachers from 90 different schools in LAUSD to incorporate music into their literacy lessons. Yes- 110. Thanks to you and our sponsors, Guitar Center and Kala Brand Music, every teacher in each of four workshops received his or her own ukulele and educational materials, too. These teachers are already helping young children develop phonemic awareness and spoken language skills in an engaging and playful manner.

Things just keep getting better. Now our newest faculty trainer, Billy Coane, himself a certificated music teacher for LAUSD, has just begun the next step in Los Angeles; it's a weekly class for Tk-5 regular classroom teachers- no musical experience necessary- to help them learn to play uke, simplified guitar, sing, and lead students in songs for learning up the grades. We have a great big class just starting and the principal, Christopher Clarke is a guitar player. He tuned all the ukuleles himself. You just can't beat this kind of administrative enthusiasm.

Doesn't this just make you smile? You did it.

Thank you so much to each of you for helping out in this amazing work bringing real music back to childhood and the power of song to learning everythihng. Please stay with us, visit the facebook page, drop a line or if you have some time, please volunteer with us. And give when you can. There are far more students out there who need GITC. We have our work cut out for us and thankfully, we're all in this together.

Back with more good news for you soon, you are appreciated,

Jess

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