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Goal

To provide enriching, accessible, hands-on musical experiences for ESE, Chorus, and Orchestra students at Cypress Palm Middle School.  

What will be done with my students

The orange buckets from Home Depot will be repurposed as drums for an activity known as "bucket drumming". Students will use the colorful drumsticks to strike the buckets. We will create our own songs with the drums, and we will also play-along to percussion YouTube videos. There are many play-along videos on YouTube that feature classical composers, such as Mozart, and modern bands, such as Imagine Dragons.

Students will use handbells and boomwhackers to play different simple songs, such as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star or modern songs like "Peaches" from the Mario Movie. When the bells are rung and the boomwhackers are hit, they produce a pitch, much like if someone hit a xylophone or struck a piano key.

Students will sing exercises from Rounds Plus as warm-ups to improve their vocal technique.

The violin strings will be used as replacements for when my school instruments' strings begin to wear down and/or break.  

Benefits to my students

The bucket drums will help my students practice rhythm and feel the steady beat. Students can hit the drums as softly or loudly as they would like, and the buckets will not damage easily. They are a great energy release for the students.

The handbells and boomwhackers will reinforce the concept of pitch for my students. The colors for both are correlated with a specific pitch. For example, "C" is red in both the bells and the boomwhackers. The color coding is particularly helpful for ESE students.

Rounds Plus is a great resource for the middle school choir classroom. All of my choir classes have male and female students. When males voices start to change/drop, they cannot sing in the same range as the female students. There is not a lot of accessible choir music for male students in this category, which can be discouraging. Roger Emerson, the author of this book, is helping to fill that gap and empower male students to keep singing during this challenging time. I want all students, regardless of gender, to feel comfortable and successful singing in my choir classes.

Violins are the smallest and most delicate instruments in the string orchestra, meaning their strings wear down and break the most easily. This means they need to be replaced the most frequently, especially for middle school students just learning how to play. While I teach my students to care for their instruments responsibly, accidents happen, and these accidents are often not their fault. I want to support them as they learn and grow.
 

Budget Narrative

Everything will be purchased from Amazon with the exception of the following:
- Homer Buckets (Home Depot)
- Prelude Strings (Christman Music)  

Items