Children have the astounding and beautiful ability to learn something from every situation they enter. For babies and toddlers, the world is so new and fresh that each experience is a first. As kids grow a bit older and enter school, the daily opportunities to learn, grow, and play are met with excitement. The experiences they have as children shape the interests and strengths they carry with them into their adult lives; given the chance, kids have unlimited potential.
So imagine what could happen if every child had the chance to be in a choir or an orchestra.
Imagine spending a significant part of one’s formative years inside a highly-functioning community that undertakes and succeeds in enormous challenges; that honors all its individual members; that is interdependent, focused, and fun; and inculcates the habits of mind and heart and beliefs about who one is and what a group can do. A community dedicated to, and designed to, live in joy and create excellence. That experience changes the trajectory of a life, of a whole generation.
– Taylor and Francis, El Sistema’s Open Secrets. Teaching Artist Journal, Volume 9, Issue 1, 2010.
At SONG, we know parents and schoolteachers work tirelessly to give children the world. We also know they can’t do it alone. It takes a village to raise a child, but the village mentality is not being applied in modern day North America. We don’t tend to take responsibility for the upbringing of other people’s children. But imagine if we did.
Solid Ground, our children’s choir and orchestra program, and Safe Harbour, our mentorship program, are SONG’s way of building that village. Each child in the SONG program will find him or herself surrounded by teachers, volunteers, mentors, and peers all working toward the common goal of creating a community that is better, happier and healthier than the one that existed yesterday. By helping each child recognize and reach for a better way, we help the whole generation.
Solid Ground begins rehearsals October 1 at Grant Sine Public School in Cobourg and Beatrice Strong Public School in Port Hope. Let the fun begin!
– Posted by Shannon