Learning With A Groove!

School:: Horizons Elementary
Subject:: Music
Teacher:: Jaclyn Ziegenfus
: Alicia Walton
Students Impacted:
Grade:: K-5
Date:: August 26, 2016

Investors

Thank you to the following investors for funding this grant.

Vanessa G - $10.00

Polk Education Foundation - $100.00

Impact to My Classroom

# of Students Impacted: 1200

With our partial funding, Horizons Elementary Music was able to purchase:

- 2 shekeres

- 15 egg shakers

- 1 set of bass boomwhackers

We tend to get the most milage out of our smaller, hand held, instruments. We now have enough egg shakers for every student, or most students, to have their own to play during class. While patience and taking turns are wonderful skills to learn, with our limited class time it greatly affects retention of skills if all students can play at all times.

We spend a lot of time with our students discussing instruments of diverse cultures. This is especially true for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade. For example, third grade students are asked to, "compare indigenous instruments of specified cultures" in our Florida state standards. Fourth grade is asked to, "identify pieces of music that originated from cultures other than one's own." Fifth grade is asked to, "compare stylistic and musical features in works originating from different cultures." We have never had shakeres before, and we are incredibly happy to be able to share this West African instrument with our students. Many of our arrangements of African rhythms for the students to play include shekere parts, and many African pieces of music our students listen to include this instrument.

Some of our favorite lessons at Horizons are about the science of sound. Boomwhackers are excellent visuals for the concept that large items have slower vibrations and lower pitches. Our bass boomwhackers that we just got from this grant our absolutely enormous! We love to allow our students to experiment and discover for themselves the correlation between instrument size and instrument pitch. Our students also spend time each year playing melodies with our boomwhackers.

Music is unique in that we are constantly doing hands-on learning as we play our instruments together. We thank you for giving our students greater opporunities to discover and learn with a groove!

grant photo

Horizons Elementary second grade students show off

grant photo

Horizons Elementary second grade students experien

Original Grant Overview

Goal

Our goal is to increase student achievement in music by adding more dynamic instrumental opportunities for our 1,167 elementary students. Let's groove with new and exciting percussion sounds!

What will be done with my students

CREATING:
- Students will use the different timbres or sound characters to create sound effects in a story.
- Students will create their own compositions.
- Students will improvise rhythms.

SKILL ACQUISITION:
- Students will practice skills such as steady beat, rhythm reading, and improvising.
- Students will practice playing melodies with boomwhackers.

CROSS-CULTURAL LEARNING:
- Students will play instruments that originate from cultures other than our own.
- Shekeres originate from West Africa.
- Tubano drums were created based on the style of other African drums.

PERFORMING:
- Students will gain experience performing as a group and working with a team to create a final product.
- Kindergarten and first grade will have an opportunity to perform on an African drum sized correctly for them called a short tubano.

These supplies will be used in every grade level and in every academic year in the foreseeable future.

Benefits to my students

STUDENT RETENTION OF INFORMATION AND SKILLS: With an elementary school that is well over a thousand students, every instrument is detrimental to student learning. While sharing is a wonderful skill to learn, more instruments means less sharing of supplies. Less sharing means more playing for each child. In a setting where we see students 1 time every 5 school days, more time doing hands-on learning greatly helps retention of information and skills.

VARIED EXPERIENCES: We are looking to purchase a variety of instruments, creating varied musical experiences for our students. While some students love our shakers, others respond better to and are more successful with drums. More variety means more opportunities for students to connect with music.

Budget Narrative

This budget would provide us with 7 large boomwhackers, 15 egg shakers, 2 shekeres, and 4 short tubanos.

The short tubanos are a smaller version of a typical tubano, allowing younger students to sit on the floor in front of the instrument to play.

Boomwhackers are tubes in which each individual tube plays a different pitch when struck. They can be used to play melodies as a team. The bass boomwhackers play low pitches.

A shekere is a West African instrument which produces sound via beads threaded around a dried gourd.

Items

#	Item	Cost
1	Bass Boomwhackers	$38.10
2	Egg Shakers - 15	$25.60
3	Small Shekere	$20.15
4	Large Shekere	$27.00
5	Short Tubano Pack (3 drums)	$292.90
6	Short Tubano 13.75" x 9"	$96.25
	Total:	$500.00

Please share this page to help in fulfilling this grant.