Service Learning Journal

Well, my group (group C) went to the work station last week on March 13, and none of us new exactly what to expect! What we found was: approximately 60 participants ranging in age from 20 to about 40 with most people in their young 20's. There disabilities ranged from a minor learning disability (being a little slow) right up to fully incapacitated in a wheel chair. The first five or ten minutes were pretty intense because we didn't know how they'd react to our program.
The good news is they responded very positively to our program! We were prepared to teach three songs, Yellow Submarine, Hey Jude, and Lean on Me. They seemed to love the idea. We wrote the lyrics of the chorus on a large sheet of paper and than played the song a few time while singing along with who ever wanted to. Hey Jude went so well, many of them got up and danced while the song was playing. Some of them were quite the dancers! So after playing and singing and dancing to Yellow Submarine and Hey Jude, we decided to pass out the percussive instruments. We decided to stick with Hey Jude for the rest of the session because they responded so well to it.
Overall the response was very positive and once we got started it felt easy and quite natural to continue with whatever worked best. Simple ideas work best.
The next step for us is to create a more organized format of the program so that the participants learn 4 or 5 new musical terms. The terms could be orchestra, or conductor etc. Also I hear there has been a request for some African music, so I plan to look into so good examples for the group. We'll be back in the first week of April. Good luck!