By Jessica Baron | Executive Director
Hello Friend, We’re sending our deepest gratitude to each of you who is supporting GITC’s effort to bring musical learning to students in Home Hospital and Transitional Support environments. The students who receive an education through special visits to their homes, or from teachers working with them in the hospital need the joy, calming, and fun of making music to get through the tremendous challenges in their young lives. Your donation has been empowering GITC to make this critical difference by providing us the opportunity to continue to train their incredible teachers in adaptive and responsive music facilitation.
Because of you, GITC teaching artist Mr. J provided musical engagement and connection for students learning from hospitals and homes through weekly Family Music Time, creating more opportunities for their parents to participate and make a musical connection with their children. The parents train along with the home hospital teachers to facilitate music with their children, using instruments supplied to them by Guitars in the Classroom thanks to YOU! Meeting together with the other families every Friday over Zoom, the parents and teacher engage with the families of other medically challenged students, and everyone shares the power and joy of strumming, drumming, singing, and more. Your gifts are creating access for these students by helping GITC teaching artists train their teachers and include family and medical staff in the process. Thank you so much for making this possible in 2022!
In addition to these Family Music Hours, Ms. S creates a sense of community and connection every week for students who have been removed from their homes by Child Protective Services, as well as teens “in transition,” who have continued to learn the art of songwriting. In October we held a very inspiring in-person adaptive music training for teachers from Home Hospital and from special education classrooms. They learned to play and incorporate new instruments including very exciting Casio keyboards that make 200 sounds! Our plans for 2023 include holding one of these Saturday free workshops in a different area of San Diego each month so Home Hospital educators and special educators throughout the region can all come together to learn in a community that encourages them to be creative, innovative, and courageously musical in the name of inclusive and effective instruction. All of that is to say that when it works, lives change. Eyes open, hands move, bodies tingle with musical excitement, voices emerge, pain dissolves, troubles fade, and hope motivates medically fragile children to believe in themselves and try something new.
We at GITC are most appreciative of your enduring support.
Wishing you a joyous holiday season,
Jess and Gail
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