Music

Music provides opportunities for personal expression, enjoyment, creative action, imagination, emotional response, aesthetic pleasure and creation of shared meanings.

When involved in music education, students learn about socio-cultural values and beliefs of themselves and others. They explore new symbol systems and interpret aspects of their world through musical activities which can provide a key to lifelong learning.

Music enriches our students' lives through participation in traditional music education activities and for our students, it can be used a support for other disciplines such as music therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy and auditory training. (Darrow 1985)

For our students music can have the additional benefits:

Assists in development of spatial awareness
Develops vocabulary
Can contribute to peer acceptance
Experiences in successive ordering in music can aid development of temporal awareness for children with hearing impairment
Improvement of memory, both long and short term through experiences involving successive sounds
Improved psychological social and emotional connection to the environment - a sense of belonging and self (Edmonds, 1984)

At St. Gabriel's, each class has a music lesson once every week, and music is included in our weekly assemblies. The lessons are practical and group orientated. We do rhythm activities using drums, xylophones, glockenspiels, keyboards and percussion instruments. Singing solo using the microphone or singing songs as a group is encouraged.

Students are exposed to the diversity of sound and experience through a variety of music genres. They are encouraged to share their favourite musical pieces with the class by performing in front of their peers.