Sound Swimmers 1: Laying foundations for project work in an SEN school
Sound Swimmers is project 1 of a 3 part Youth Music funded SEN school project programme. The project took place at Hazel Court SEN school in Eastbourne 04/22 - 06/22. Each project shares the aim of trialing innovative ways of engaging SEN schools in project work utilising music, film and inclusive music teaching aids and tools. The brief for Sound Swimmers was to work with the school over 10 weeks to create an interactive sound installation. This blog highlights some of the milestones along the journey.
In our first meetings with the school we aimed to establish a solid foundation for successful project work. Musical icebreaker activities were designed to enable us to get to know each other and to help Lifesize facilitators get a sense of the abilities and support needs of the pupils. We found it is very helpful to establish a format / framework for our regular SEN class session work so the pupils and teaching staff could have a clear awareness of the likely duration and sequence of activities within the session. We began with a musical introduction and discussions/demonstrations about the instruments being played, as pupils entered the space our facilitation team would present a live piece of music and provide a means of taking part either through singing or instrument playing.
We themed our introduction songs around musical types / genres eg Jazz, Film soundtracks, ethnic music types etc. The featured songs and songwriters were also presented through pictures and basic biographical information. This helped contextualise the activity and also give opportunity for follow up from the teaching staff in class sessions when we were not there. It also gave the opportunity for our facilitators to instroduce their musicality each week which in turn provided the group with source material for their Arts Award portfolio. One of the artists and pieces we we explored was Thelonius monk and his famous jazz piece Blue Monk.
The activity became a safe and expected part of the session- staff and pupils would expect to be greated with live music when entering the room, it led to dancing and other signs of enjoyment and engagement. It also meant when we structured our sessions to then lead into each weeks second activity we had managed to settle the group and engage the pupils.
