Community Arts

We learned that our artistic goals were achieved by observing children's behavior in class, hearing parent comments in class, and by reading the questionnaire responses. Parents and grandparents expressed that their children were exhibiting the ability to keep a steady beat. Some of the adults said that their very young children (ages 1 and 2 years) had not developed this skill yet, which is to be expected for children at these ages. Most parents/grandparents communicated that their children were singing much more frequently as a result of music class and some indicated that the singing was more tuneful. We noticed in the Picture Book Music class that most of the children were singing along animatedly to the books that we sang, moved to, and played instruments to. Adults commented that their children loved to move to music and one child stated, "I just love to sing and dance!" Another adult indicated that her child danced more rhythmically as a result of music class. Some adults stated that their children's dancing changed with the style of music. Children and adults in the classes heard many different styles of music from many different cultures including: African-American spirituals, classical music, reggae music and folk tunes from several countries. Our goal was to serve approximately 80 registered children with 70 adults attending weekly classes. We actually had 66 children registered with 67 accompanying adults. Our enrollment was up by 24 registered children from the 2015 Winter/Spring Semester enrollment of 44. We estimated that 24 children would receive 1/2 tuition scholarships; 12 children actually used scholarships for the Winter/Spring 2016 semester. We estimated that 12 children would use the sibling discount of 3/4 full tuition. Nine sibling discounts were actually used. Two thirds of the scholarships were used by families enrolling in the shorter 8-week classes, one class with a $15 materials fee and the other class with no materials fee. Our goal in offering these shorter classes with lower fees was to attract families who might not have been able to afford the 16-week classes, even with the help of scholarships; therefore we met the goal of a more diverse community in our classes, although we would've liked the number of families taking our classes with the help of a scholarship to be higher. We are delighted that approximately 25 grandparents attended class with their grandchildren, most of whom attended weekly, and some of whom attended occasionally or as one-time visitors. We made our class accessible by having chairs available in the classroom for grandparents who couldn't or preferred not to sit on the floor. Fourteen out of the 66 children attending were new to our classes and either were referred by friends or learned of our classes from flyers. Sixty-six children registered for classes, which was a significant increase in enrollment from the 42 children registered from the previous year. In a questionnaire, and in comments in class, approximately 80% of parents and grandparents indicated that their children were singing at home frequently as a result of the class experience.