The Chronicles of a Summit Service Project

The Chronicles of a Summit Service Project

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Spring Music Project

This Spring has been hectic but the Harmony House girls wanted to slow things down and play some good music. Bridget, Karen, and I are all musically and theatrically inclined so we decided to share our interests with the kids of Harmony House.

Kelsey:
The last few weeks we composed a workshop schedule to spend three consecutive Sundays with the kids learning more about music, theatre, and dance. Our first workshop was today and the three of us brought our ukuleles and sheet music to share. We spend time with the kids and played some of their favorites like "Let it Go" from Frozen and the Spongebob theme song. We taught some of the older kids how to play a few simple chords and asked about their interest in music and musical instruments. Several of the kids were already in their school's band or choir. While our crowd was fairly young, they still seemed to enjoy the workshop. It was a bit difficult to hold their attention so we are regrouping to make the next two workshops a bit more structured and fast-paced. Overall we had a great time and look forward to planning our acting workshop for next Sunday.

Here is a photo of me helping one girl with a new chord on my ukulele. (For the sake of privacy, we cannot show any photographs of the children)

Karen:
On Sunday March 30th we started out big project of the year as a group! We went to Harmony House and did our first workshop. We played our ukuleles and sang with the kids. We played songs that they mostly knew and they were able to sing along with us. The children lit up and were very excited to sing some of the songs. Their favorite song was Let It Go from Frozen. They had us play it several times so they could sing along. We all got a chance to do a solo song as well and they sat fairly quietly and listened. Kelsey and I let them play our ukes; we taught them a few chords and showed them how to hold it. They were very thrilled to get to play and there were even a few who had some natural talent! We had planned the workshop for 2 hours but we slowly lost our audience. It's not entirely easy to keep the attention of children on a warm weekend day. However we were very pleased with the number of kids we did have and the amount of interest they showed. For next weeks acting workshop we hope to have a few more kids and maybe to keep there attention for a little bit long!

Bridget:
I think that the music workshop went well. The kids seemed to really like it. They loved singing the song from "Frozen", "Let It Go". I brought the song thinking that they would kind of like it, but they ended up asking us to sing it with them three or four times! The kids really loved when we let them play our ukuleles. Their faces lit up from the moment they played their first chord. I am music education, and it made me really excited that I will get to do stuff like this every day for the rest of my life.​

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