A Year of Making Music with Homebound & Hospitalized Kids

​This year, thanks to a groundbreaking grant from the Picerne Foundation, a small team of GITC teaching artists including Sharon DuBois (above), Terry Brockmann, and Christopher Clarke, have been teaming up with people within each child's Circle of Care to develop specialized musical skills, understandings, musical learning, and songs. 

Home hospital teachers have been teaching us to use music apps, and physical tech like the AbleNet BIGmack and LITTLE Step-by-Step speech generating devices that record children's sounds or favorite song lines. ​​

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 Children who lack physical strength or motor control can trigger their music using a sensor to read their slightest movements in order to generate the music. Keyboards that sit across a lap or a wheelchair tray are very popular. 

Thanks to enthusiastic support from the leaders at the Carlson Home Hospital School in Los Angeles, GITC was invited to provide adaptive music training for their full faculty of 80 educators who serve all over the largest school district in California! We met in person, and from that big group emerged a vibrant, dedicated bi-monthly cohort of highly engaged teachers who brought adaptive music with GITC to their students and families with  every week supported by GITC teaching artist, Christopher Clarke.
On this special day below, several teachers gathered at Totally KIds Specialty Care to make music with their long term hospitalized students. W cannot show children's faces, but you can see what's taking place if you look closely. 
​Christopher is on the left.

We're hoping to hire and train more teaching artists with a background in special education or music therapy to become adaptive music teachers who can bring this educational work to four more hospital in L.A.! Friends, if you know someone, please send them our way.
​We send immeasurable gratitude and thanks to Victor Nelson and the Picerne Family Foundation for their support. Thank you to Mrs. Robnett and Ms. Dellorco for your incredible leadership at the Carlson Home Hospital School in Los Angeles, and to Ms. Sylvia Ecchevaria, Director of San Diego's Home Hospital Transitions Support School!

Thanks to everyone who has been along on GITC's journey into making music accessible, joyful, and healing for children and youth with complex medical conditions. For several years, we've been teaming up with home hospital teachers in San Diego and Los Angeles Unified School Districts to create a gentle, responsive approach to facilitating hands-on music for learning and wellness with young people living with medical fragility.

Thousands of students with profound neurological, cognitive, behavioral, or degenerative disorders are unable to attend school, so school must come to them wherever they reside. Music is making life better for so many students now, thanks to the Picerne Foundation, and people in these children’s Circles of Care, guided by a GITC teaching artist.

Medically isolated students are among the least likely Americans to receive music education in any form. Thousands live in a place where making music is not available despite its unique capacity to foster communication, learning, self-expression, well-being, and human connection. According to the National Survey of Children's Health, approximately one in five children in the United States has special or complex health care needs, representing more than 14.5 million children.

​Whether the students are medically homebound, are hospitalized, or are living in long term residential care facilities, they love making music! Favorite sounds of strings, bells, keys, slide whistles, drums, and more elicit beautful smiles, excitement, vocal expression, fine and large motor movement, and intentional musicality. What a blessing to make this experience accessible, and sustainable!Ukes stabilized on wheelchair trays or tables with traction mats and played with a special Herco thumb pick or a tennis ball pick make strumming possible without a child needing any manual dexterity.
Our approach begins with an individualized assessment called Measures of Joy. Rather than expecting children to adapt to traditional instruction, we adapt music to the child. identifying each student's musical preferences by noticing their vocalizations, eye movements, emotional expression, and physical responses to different instruments, we find the ones they love and build access so they can make the music themselves, with support. The caregivers surrounding each student—teachers, therapists, parents, siblings, and medical staff - are encouraged to join in. 

This year, participating students experienced many benefits of making and receiving music,  showing surprising gains in alertness, sustained focus, emotional, physical, energetic, and vocal/verbal engagement, plus cognitive/academic progress by pairing music with other learning.  Caregivers expressed greater feelings of connectedness to their children or students, many of whom are entirely non-verbal. This intuitive and musical connection is invaluable for a population with limited means of verbal and physical communication.  We saw how music becomes a medium through which love is expressed between caregivers and children.  Parents began to sing to their children, and witnessed the children responding with smiles, vocalization, reaching out, and physical expressions of excitement and appreciation. 

 In addition to facilitating responsive music in hospital settings, our teaching artists were able to work in the homes of children with debilitating conditions.  In L.A. Terry Brockmann provided Circle of Care residencies for two boys with rare, degenerative disorders, their mothers, and their home hospital teachers. After a particularly exciting session, she shared, "I had another fantastic day with LeAnn & her student Yahir (with degenerative "metaleukodystrophy") . We were joined by the occupational and speech therapists, and they LOVED what we were doing with music. They said they saw his heightened responses that they hadn't seen before! 

Yahir really took to the keyboard, figured out how to work it, and was delighted (as was Mom) that he could keep it and play music! I did a lot more with him with music, working as a team - he counted, named colors, numbers, enunciated words (difficult, but he did it!). All went swimmingly today - very exciting! The therapists are very impressed and interested in GITC online ukulele, and integrating music." 

We are so grateful to Yahir, his mom, and his Circle of Care, below. Terry is standing with the ukulele. Carlson Home Hospital teacher LeAnn, Ms. Cheryl - the occupational therapist, and Ms. B, the speech therapist are surrounding third grader, Yahir. Congratulations and thanks to each of you! 

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