Roots of American Music (ROOTS) received a grant to support presentations of our Blues is the Backbone music education classes to kindergarten and second grade students in public schools. ROOTS also received generous support from The Kulas Foundation and the John P. Murphy Foundation to provide this music education during the 2024-25 school year.
The Blues is the Backbone music education program supports students’ emotional and social milestones through music. This interactive music education program teaches kindergarten students the structure of music notes, pitch, rhythm, and rhyme. The students will sing and dance to Blues music, learning to keep the beat with their feet or hands, as well as singing along. The Teaching Artist will guide the students through the story of various blues musicians, and the thoughts and feelings behind their music story. Students will work together to create a class song using words to tell their classroom story.
For second grade students, Blues is the Backbone music education program supports their cognitive and emotional development as the students begin to see other points of view, understand, and ask questions about the blues music stories, and learn and empathize with the blues musicians’ life experiences. Second graders want to spend more time with their classmates, and the Blues music helps them learn how others are perceived and how they are perceived by their peers. While this age group can express periods of dramatic emotion and impatience they will learn, hear, and sing how blues music can help with that self-expression.
Author, Judy Willis writes, “When information is learned, practiced, or applied through different senses (hearing, seeing, touching, moving), the memories are stored in multiple regions of the brain.” (https://www.edutopia.org/article/using-music-support-deeper-learning ) Roots of American Music has presented the Blues is the Backbone music education program for four years in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD).
Learning about blues music, blues musicians, the social, cultural, and human experiences told through the lyrics of blues music will connect with students’ emotions and life experiences. Our Teaching Artists are respectful, encouraging, insightful, supportive, interested in the development of the students, strive to connect the music to the student’s experiences and how the music will appear across other school subjects helping them learn and retain information. Through the music education program, Blues is the Backbone, is the opportunity for students to collaborate with their peers on their class song, learn of a classmate’s differing viewpoint as they create lyrics, and express empathy and joy through music and the class song.
You can bring this program to your school by contacting our Education Program Director at education@rootsofamericanmusic.org