What is your spark?
What are the things you are interested in or passionate about?
What things motivate you to learn more, work harder, and get better?
In the Arts & Smarts Program, we talk about our sparks a lot. Research shows that youth who know what their sparks are and who have adults who encourage those sparks are more likely to thrive than their peers.
Music is one spark that we’ve been exploring recently. It’s a spark for Spencer, who is one of our Program Assistants. This spring he has brought his guitar to teach the group about the building blocks of music and to help our participants write their own songs.
He began by telling the group about chords and by playing a variety of chords so they could hear the differences. Then we strung the chords together to make songs. Each participant chose a starting chord then rolled a die to determine where the song would go from there. Spencer played the resulting chord progression, and everyone commented on how the series of chords made them feel. Some of these songs were happy, some were sad, some reminded the group of a scary movie.
The discussion of chords continued another day when Spencer helped the participants compose their own songs on the piano. He told the group that if they played only the piano’s white keys it would be in the key of C. He played chords on his guitar to demonstrate what the key of C sounds like. Then he encouraged them to pick out a melody on the piano while he played chords to accompany them on his guitar. In this way, they built songs together.
The visual arts often get the spotlight in our Arts & Smarts programming, so it’s a wonderful thing to highlight another form of art. It’s wonderful to give our participants an opportunity to explore new sparks like music and for them to hear one of our adult leaders speaking on a topic that brings him joy.
Below is one of the musical collaborations.