On April 15, 2016 at Muffley School in Decatur, Illinois, I helped out
at the instrument zoo for multiple shifts and my only regret is that I couldn’t
go to the first one as well. Out of all of my observation hours, I had the most
enjoyable time there and was in such a good mood after it was finished. It was
such a joy watching the children light up when they could get a sound out of
the saxophone and kept wanting to play it for longer and longer. While there,
we were teaching the children how to produced sounds out of the different horns
while also trying to familiarize them with all of the different types of
instruments that they could play. Most of them had little to no pervious
instrumental experience, but took to playing the different horns quite well. Us
older students did our best to describe as simply as we could how to properly
make sounds out of our respective instruments, and then set the children up to
be able to freely play a few notes. The more and more instruments the children
played and could make noise from, the more they wanted to try more instruments
from around the room. They seemed to really enjoy what we and they were doing.
Personally, being able to physically show how to have the proper embouchure
for saxophone was much easier than trying to describe it to the children. I
would though have the children play clarinet first before trying saxophone only
because saxophone takes more air, so those students that played saxophone first
where overblowing quite a bit while trying the clarinet. After getting the
children to be able to make a sound, the next best thing for them to do was
honestly let them press what buttons they wanted to press and try making their
own music. Being able to make multiple noises independently made the students
that much more enthusiastic about doing what they were doing.
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