Guitars for Success

Impact to My Classroom

# of Students Impacted: 170

This is a grant that was used for both 4th & 5th Grade music students at Lake Park Elementary School.  Our 5th grade students learned basic hand positions and learned to both pluck and strum.  They learned to play from chord symbols.  If you look at the pictures, you can see we were working on the D, G and A7 chords at that point.  By learning just three chords in a key, students were able to see that they could literally play hundreds of simple songs right away.  The students learned to play along with trying to sing.  I believe they developed an appreciation for what performers do.  With gaining the understanding of reading chord symbols, the students learned they could help themselves and figure out a chord if they did not know it.

The experience for the 4th graders was a little bit different.  These students focused on the ukelele in the beginning.  I feel this is a bit easier than starting younger students on guitar.  They eventually toward the end started to play the guitar.  The were able to right away see the similarities to the ukelele.  Learning to read a chord symbol with 6 strings was different for them, but yet recognizeable since they had done something similar with the 4 string ukeleles.  Some of their basic skills they learned transferred to the guitar.  This was encouraging to see.  Our current 4th graders will only play the guitar next year as 5th graders.