Thanks to Ms. Repha Buckman's insight and hard work, the Spirit Songs Music AIE Program received a 21st Century Residency grant from the S.W. Arkansas Arts Council enabling me to work with the 4th through 8th grade students in the Hope, Arkansas school district. The residency was for a total of ten weeks.
A four week residency was established with the William Jefferson Primary School. This program enabled me to work with the 26 fourth grade G/T students with Millie Green as well as the fourth grade music classes with Jeannie McGee. A four week residency was established with the entire fifth and sixth grade music classes with Sandra Jones at the Beryl Henry Elementary School. This residency enabled me to teach Native American flute to approx. 395 fifth and sixth grade students. A core group of eight students volunteered part of their lunch time for practice and then performed for the Hope, Ar. Chapter of the Kawanis Club, lunch included. A two week residency was also established enabling the flute program to be presented to the seventh and eighth grade music classes with Carol Burke at the Yerger Junior High School. Eighty students participated in this residency. Each of the three music departments received 25 PVC classroom flutes for the continuation of this program in the Hope School District's music curriculum. I cannot know to the exact number how many students participated in this program. I do approximate that five hundred students had an opportunity to participate.
The S.W. Arkansas Arts Council presented evaluation questionaires to the students and also took evaluation videos. The S.W. Arkansas Arts Council and Ms. Buckman can be contacted at swaac@arkansas.net for the results of this evaluation. I presented the seventh and eighth grade students from the Yerger Jr. High School program my own questionaire. The results are as follows:
Native American Flute Program
William Worden
Artist in Education
Ar. Arts Council
Yerger Residency
Hope, Arkansas 5/4-8/09 5/11-15/09
1. Did you think that you would ever play a musical instrument?
29 yes 33 no
45% 55%
2. Do you think that you learned to play the Native American flute?
36 yes 22 a little 2 no
60% 37% 4%
3. Was it hard to learn to play the flute?
1 very hard 7 hard 40 easy 12 very easy
2% 12% 67% 20%
4. Were you able to go to the board, write a song and play it?
54 yes 6 no
90% 10%
5. Were you able to improvise a song?
55 yes 5 no
92% 8%
6. Did you enjoy playing the flute?
2 not much 3 a little bit 9 sort of 16 yes 30 very much
3% 5% 15% 26% 50%
7. Would you like to have more lessons on the flute?
44 yes 16 no
73% 27%
Write any comments below:
It is my opinion that the statistics from the seventh and eighth grade evaluation are similar in numbers to the fourth and fifth/sixth grade programs. The results of this program from the data collected cannot show the looks on the faces of the students as they proved to themselves that they had the ability, the creativity, not only to play a musical instrument, but to write and improvise their own songs. By the second week the seventh and eighth grade students were playing simple songs such as Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, On Top of Old Smokey, London Bridge, Amazing Grace and Frere' Jacques, which some students could play as a round.
We now look forward to the next school year in Hope as each class moves on to the next grade level. Ms. Sandra Jones will have new students as fifth and sixth graders who will be starting their second year of instruction. Ms. Burke will have experienced students coming from Beryl Henry's sixth grade as well as the graduates from her last years seventh grade class. I can only anticipate the progress that might be achieved with the continuation of this program in the schools of Hope, Arkansas.
If you would like to read some letters from teachers that have used this program, please visit our MessageBoard .
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