Grant gives Pleasant Grove Elementary School a new sound

Jul. 5—Several new instruments spurred Pleasant Grove Elementary School music students to perform plays and puppet shows for their classmates this spring accompanied by music.

"It would have been impossible to do what we're doing with those (old) instruments that were falling apart," said Michele Headrick, music specialist at Pleasant Grove. "They were old and needed to be replaced."

Headrick added several bass bars and Orff instruments with a $2,500 M.B. Seretean Foundation grant, she said. Named for the German composer and educator Carl Orff — best known for his cantata "Carmina Burana" — the Orff instruments are similar to xylophones, but bars can be added, subtracted or set up in different ways, which "really comes in handy," while the bass bars "add so much richness to the songs."

Edwin Flores had no experience with bass bars, but caught on quickly, the then-fifth-grader said this spring. In fact, learning the bass bar was a highlight of the school's "Once Upon a Tune" project.

"Once Upon a Tune" combines children's literature and storytelling with music to encourage theatrics, musical improvisation, movement and a sense of rhythm and rhyme, said Susan Reams, who chairs the Oscar N. Jonas Foundation board. The Jonas Foundation administers the Seretean grants. Students are actively engaged in literature as they create musical drama to act out children's stories, poems or rhymes.

"Each grade level is doing a different book," said Headrick. Students could choose whether to do plays or puppet shows, with the latter particularly popular with upper grades.

Anne Hunter's "Possum's Harvest Moon" was the featured book for fifth-graders for this project, as a possum plans a party for the final night before winter, but his fellow animal friends are "too busy" to attend, disheartening the possum, said then-fifth-grader Abby O'Bryant, who voiced the possum. Finally, a rabbit agrees to join the possum's party, and "they have a great time."

There are "lessons in these books, but they're also fun," Headrick said. For example, in Deborah Diesen's "The Pout-Pout Fish" — which third-graders performed — a depressed fish sees through his friendships that "he doesn't have to be sad all the time."

This project connects music to other disciplines, particularly language arts, Headrick said.

"We've worked on vocabulary," as there were some words in books unfamiliar to younger students, such as "astounded" and "aghast," and students also learned how to identify topics, ideas and themes, as well as "quoting accurately from a text."

Lessons in improvisation, sound effects, playing contrasting parts, following directions, listening and giving peer feedback were also crucial, she said.

"They're learning so much — most of them have never acted before — and it's (all about) creativity."

More than anything, O'Bryant learned "new cooperation skills" through this project, she said. "You have to listen to other ideas and integrate them together so everyone is OK with it, not just you."

it's been a truly collaborative endeavor, she said: "Everyone is pitching in and having fun."

Challenged to learn all her lines as the lead character, she grew more comfortable performing the more she did so, she said.

"I have stage fright, but it's gotten a lot easier."

Headrick opened up her music classroom to other teachers, who regularly brought their students to watch the performances. The performances were recorded, so parents could access them online.

M.B. Seretean Foundation grants — arts-in-education competitive grants are available annually to elementary teachers in Dalton Public Schools, Murray County Schools and Whitfield County Schools — are administered through the Oscar N. Jonas Foundation. Bud Seretean was an early and generous contributor to the Creative Arts Guild — his friendship with Oscar Jonas led him to be a founding member and later chairman of the Jonas Foundation — so the grants honor their love of the arts.

"This is not a project we'll do and be done," Headrick said. "It'll last for years, because I plan to do it at least once a year."