Education United States Project #33004

Songs for Help, Hope, Healing & Comfort

by Guitars in the Classroom

Project Report | Jan 16, 2020
There Are Four Things We Can Do!

By Jessica Baron | Executive Director

Teresa and her husband, Rhys - GITC Songsters!

Dear Friend,

If you know kindergarteners, first graders or second graders, you already know that teasing, cheating, bullying, lying, excluding and name calling produce a gnarly aftermath- tattling! Primary teachers need a constructive song to cure the need to tattle. (They also need songs to cure all those other troubles, too, hence this project!)

The social emotional awareness and refined social skills children need to learn to navigate at school take lots of thinking, self control and practice to master. But music can speed the process along. It took one heroic, dedicated, resolute and time-crunched primary teacher to solve the tattling problem.

San Diego Unified teacher Mrs. Teresa came up with a brillant solution. She wrote a song for her students to sing and memorize that contains four goof-proof strategies for solving social problems. She brought that song to my after school PD at Jefferson Elementary in North Park one day and played it for the group. Her colleagues and I went nuts!

This song is so catchy. She borrowed the public domain melody from the traditional Gold Rush song, "Clementine," Can't go wrong repurposing that song as the original lyrics are about a girl with no shoes who drowns. Not exactly cheery stuff. So many old songs are dark and need a rewrite because they were written to cope with hardship (think the Black Plague).

I asked Ms. Teresa if she realized she had written a hit and she humbly replied, "Well I thought it seemed pretty good..." Truthfully, teachers have a true knack for songwriting. But Ms. Teresa is a phenom. So the collection of songs for this book keeps growing.

I hope you will indulge me for a moment and hum along to "Clementine" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebyiyntVQNM. Next sing it again using Ms, Teresa's phenomenal lyrics, below. (These are now copyrighted by the way). The next time you need to give sage advice to a young person who is on the receiving end of hurtful words, you;ll have her song to fall back in.

We are not supposed to use full names in our GlobalGiving reports but for copyright purposes, you need hers.

There Are Four Things

There are four things, there are four things, there are four things I can do.

When somebody is bothering me, there are four things I can do.

I can talk it out, I can walk away, I’ll ignore the thing they do.

When all else fails, find a grown up or a friend to help me through!

I hope this new GITC song brings a smile to your face and more importantly a new tool to help little ones heal their hearts when their friends act like, well...little kids. Thanks for sharing my delight. And if you share Teresa's song, please be sure to give her credit where credit is due. Thanks.

Yours for the children,

Jess

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Oct 18, 2019
A Song for Survival in School and at Home!

By Jess Baron | Executive Director

Miss D trains our teachers!

Dear Supporter,

Today we want to share with you about a song written to the tune of Bingo by our "Head of Sped," Desirée. This song is lovingly refered to as "The Green Zone Song" but its official title is "These Are Strategies."

If you have spent time with someone who experiences extreme sensory overstimulation that results in increasing levels of anxiety and aggression, you may know of the agony they experience. When sounds, sights and sensations become more than they can process or handle, it is normal for the extreme discomfort to make them "boil over" into violent behavior. Perhaps you are thinking to yourself, is she talking about Autism? My answer is maybe but not always. Just understanding that a child is in great distress is enough. And getting them to help is more important here than applying diagnostic labels. There are many reasons kids boil over.

Extreme behavior can look like flapping, shrieking, hitting, biting, screaming, attacking others and throwing objects. Students in these states usually become a danger to themselves and others. This escalation often leads to injuries and broken windows as well as the destruction of school property. When this happens in a classroom, classmates can become scared and may get hurt.

The teacher must contain the student if they can. If they cannot, they must "clear the classroom" meaning they have to quickly remove all of the other students from the room rather than risk injury. Learning is lost. Chaos reigns. And back in the classroom, in the absence of the teacher, the student in crisis may be breaking their teachers' supplies and furniture. This kind of event is happening every day.

By the time help eventually arrives, not much can be done. The storm has passed. The wreckage is everywhere including inside the student who boiled over. Students who have these behavioral emergencies may be suspended. If the troubles persist, they may be expelled. At the very least, they have lost academic time and caused other students to do the same. The police might get involved, too. The cost to the school and the school district is great as well. And the impact on the child and their family is very serious.

As a behaviorist, Miss D. asked herself what she could do that might possibly help students with extreme sensory and emotional overwhelm. And as a singer, songwriter and GITC Faculty Trainer, her first idea was to write a song for students to sing to remind themselves of things they can do to calm themselves down! She turned to a popular teaching approach for helping such students called the Zones of Regulation. You can read lots about it by following the link below.

The appproach teaches students to identify their emotional condition according to color-coded zones and to come up with positive strategies to stay in or get back to the Green Zone. The zones include Green for calm, Yellow for stressed, Blue for sad and Red for angry. In each zone the student learns to identify and name their feelings, study and practice constructive social thinking strategies that help them regain self control, and restore themselves to a calm inner state before it's too late.

So Miss D created a verse for each zone with a blank in each verse so students can come up with feeling words that accurately describe their emotions. This is followed by another blank in which they can write a social thinking strategy that will get them "back to green" where they can "feel calm." When a student is in the Yellow Zone, they may feel "worried" and "need to breathe." In the Blue Zone they may feel "lonely" and need to "ask for a hug." in the Red Zone they may feel "furious" and need to "walk it out." The solutions students learn keep them and everyone else safe.

Miss D. first taught her song to students in our district's STARS program for college bound Autistic students. She was how quickly and enthusiastically her students adopted the song, asked to sing it daily, and began using it among themselves to help each other manage their own well-being. Then one day, a student in the throws of escalating from the Yellow Zone into Red came running into class and yelled to his classmates, "I need the Green Zone Song! Sing me the Green Zone song!" The class jumped right on it and sang their classmate down from Red, back through Yellow and clear on back to Green. It felt like nothing short of a miracle. Disaster was stopped in its tracks in 3 minutes. That student showed everyone how to calm down with the song at the time of crisis.

Since that day, our faculty in San Diego has been teaching the song to every educator who comes into our AMAISE trainings. AMAISE stands for Adaptive Music for Achievement in Inclusion and Special Education. Last weekend we held a conference for special educators in our district at Whittier School. The teachers came from all over San Diego! Everyone learned to sing, play and lead the "Green Zone Song." This week, students are learning a new way to help themselves understand and artfully manage their emotional states. We are so grateful and proud to be including it in the forthcoming songbook!

Thank you so much for your support, Friends. You can read more about Miss D. at the link provided below that leads to a blog about her work with GITC. We cannot wait to share the book and her song with you by the end of this year!

We wish you well through plenty of green days ahead,

Jess

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Jul 19, 2019
Redux! Put a Little Love in Your Heart!

By Jessica Baron | Executive Director

Dear Supporter,

We are happy to send you this report with one important typo we missed below fixed in capital letters! A sneaky little word, "now" -good news- had turned into "not" - bad news- so worth revising for you. Thanks for your patience!

Thank you so much for continuing to support this important project. I'd like to share a few important new developments that have taken place in the last few weeks.

When we first started this project, it was a responsive idea based on what teachers were talking about in our training programs. We saw a need to address emotional needs of children experiencing stress and crisis. But this past school year, there has been a major shift in curricular focus across the nation. Instead of focusing solely on academics, The Department of Education is finally paying attention to social emotional learning or what teachers call in shorthand SEL. So have we, especially in our work with students in special education.

What this shift means for this project is an expanded goal of not only providing teachers with songs that help students cope with and rise above difficulties but it will NOW include songs that give them social and emotional strategies that are specific to self soothing and developing emotionally healthy habits. The book will also include songwriting fill in the blank worksheets to prompt students to put their understandings and strategies into songs!

Last week we negotiated with the largest print music publisher in the United States to grant us favorable terms for including several popular songs in the book for a reduced fee. We were hoping they would publish the book for us but their publishing schedule is too busy. So we will be doing it ourselves. We will also be producing a CD because teachers still use the use their boomboxes in their classrooms even more than MP3 downloads.

We'll be working on getting the rights to songs in the next month and then we will be ready to physically begin to produce the book. The last stage will be recording the music which will probably take place in the early fall. It helped to have the book CD ready beginning of 2020.

Thank you so much for continuing to follow the growth of this project. I believe you will be very proud of it in the end.

Warmly,

Jess

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