By Jessica Baron | Executive Director
Dear Friend of Guitars in the Classroom,
Thank you for caring about the well-being & education of children so much. Your generous contribution to this campaign focused on music for children in preschool and primary grades has made a fantastic difference for them ever since its inception last year. Now, thanks to you and everyone who pitched in, we have reached our goal together.
The next microproject will focus on young children acquiring English as a second language with our AMIGO Project so please keep an eye open!
For now please know that students and teachers in some of the roughest areas of Los Angeles are making music every week with instruments your charity provided. In Oxnard, too! And Head Start teachers in Mississippi and Alabama have not only carried on, but are starting up in 2 new locations! We have completed our teacher training in Mililani, Hawaii and the teachers have instruments to keep using in their classrooms. And as of last week, kindergarden teachers in Beaufort, South Carolina started training with master teacher Joan Maute!Ukes are on their way to their classrooms! Head Start Teachers in Worcester, Massachusetts are also completing their year of training with our amazing trainer, Jon Short.
You can actually hear Jon's music (he is a GREAT Blues player) here on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJSIQ3SaKiY. This song about the Asian Long Horned Beetle proves our point that you can write a song about ANYTHING and it will teach you a lesson that really sticks.
In addition, we will begin training teachers in 5 summer intensives in the San Diego area- teachers are welcome to come from everywhere to study with us for a week. You can learn about those trainings,here: http://www.guitarsintheclassroom.org/2014/05/summer-intensives-coming/.
Do you know a teacher who wants to learn to lead the way and teach through music? Please pass along our information. We are teaching on a donation basis, as always, and the doors are wide open! No experience is necessary and the teacher will receive everything the need to get started including a guitar and a ukulele. This is how we spread the magic and learning.
In all, this microproject has helped us train over 120 teachers, place 160 ukuleles in classrooms, and is reaching a thousand children each week with daily musical learning in every subject area. Whether children are learning their colors, numbers, letters and weather through song or singing about friendship, the environment or family, their teachers are leading the way, helping them keep time, sing in tune, create new words, and blend their voices in song all because of you!
If you want to feel the love that goes into a GITC class, please treat yourself to the music of our trainer, Joan Maute, an expert songwriter and singer whose work in the schools spans more than 30 years! Here at her website, you have access to many of her compositions. http://www.joanmaute.com/ Joan has personally trained hundreds of teachers in South Carolina, Georgia, Massachusetts and San Diego through her service with Guitars in the Classroom! We are all very grateful to her for sharing her passion for music and education with teachers and children through this organization.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your effort to make the world a positive place for kids whether they live in the South, the East, or near the CA border,or an island in the Pacific. They are all ours and they need and appreciate our love and care so much. And you are there for them.
Let's keep the music going together in new places!
Wishing you health, peace, inspiration and abundance,
Jess
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By Jessica Baron | Executive Director
By Jessica Baron | Executive Director
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