Lifesize: Building new connections with a SEN school
This short series of posts is a brief deviation from the chronological series of posts looking back at the first year of our organisation’s (lifesize.org.uk) creative music for wellbeing work with young people. We would like to share some of our experiences of recent projects we devised and ran in collaboration with Saxon Mount, a local SEN secondary school.
In the spring of 2021 after successfully having delivered remote music workshops for several community groups we approached a local SEN secondary school to see if our workshop offer would be of interest to them. Thanks to funding support from The National Lottery, we were able to offer several complimentary workshops to trial our remote workshops in a school setting. The year 8 music teacher was very supportive and helped facilitate our workshops from within the classroom whilst our facilitators were using video conference software. We delivered several resources such as flashcards and instruments to the school. We worked remotely in the classroom with a year 8 class of 12 students and facilitated a fully interactive workshop that combined accessible notation (find out more here: figurenotes.org) Live instrument playing and composition with an online music sequencer (soundtrap.com). It was exciting to deliver a workshop in this way and was made possible thanks to the support of the class teacher who was able to make this work smoothly, operating a webcam and microphone and supporting engagement so we could see and interact with the students. Here is some feedback we received:
Lifesize facilitated an engaging and exciting remote composition workshop for a group of Year 8 pupils here at Saxon Mount School. They learnt about elements of music including pitch, rhythm and timbre through accessible activities and use of music technology. Working towards composing a collaborative music piece, the pupils were supported to make informed choices in selecting samples and they used a keyboard to create their own melodies on a sequencer accompanied by a drum track.
Lifesize had a calm and well-structured approach to working with the pupils and he encouraged them to express their ideas using a range of communication strategies. The workshops were adapted to take place via a video call therefore Lifesize had organised the resources to ensure that the activities were as interactive as possible, such as through using musical instruments, flashcards and a notation system that involved colours and shapes.
Saxon Mount, Year 8 music tutor
