Friday 31 December 2010

Gillian Howell in Timor, Day 56

Gillian Howell, musician and educator, is in Timor Leste. Her blog posts are original, informative and moving. Here's a taster...
Thursday, Day 56
Today was the first day of The Right To Play project and I’m relieved to say we got off to an overall strong and productive start, especially given my anxiety of the previous day! We had a group of about 20 children (fewer than planned, but perfectly good numbers for a project of this kind). Marqy and his team worked alongside Tony and myself, and it was a good day.
We started with some music games and warm-ups, establishing some foundational music disciplines in eye contact, imitation, careful listening, and cuing:
  • Physical warm-up with stretches, copying hand gestures
  • Call-and-response structures, using names and rhythms
  • Passing the clap swiftly around the circle, changing direction in response to clear eye contact, and being ready to respond to unexpected changes
  • Passing multiple contrasting sounds around the circle in opposing directions, first with eyes open, then with eyes closed.
We introduced our framing theme of human rights, and children’s rights in particular. We asked the children if they could think of any human rights, and their responses brought about some clarification of what is meant by rights, and how they are different to wants, or likes.
Then we started on some music-making. We had the idea of presenting children’s rights through the music in the context of a child’s childhood years, from birth through to the age of about 12 or so. Today we focused on the music to represent brith and the start of life. Read more...  http://musicwork.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/the-right-to-play-%E2%80%93-first-workshop/

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