Establish a ukulele program at Timber Lane!

UPDATE as of May 2023: Success! Thanks to all of your generous donations, together with a generous sales offset offered by local business Foxes Music, we have achieved our goal. Timber Lane Elementary officially has class sets of ukuleles, which will benefit all of our students for years to come!

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Ms. Thomas from Timber Lane Elementary School, a Title I school in Falls Church, Virginia, is partnering with the Timber Lane PTA to raise money to establish a ukulele program for 5th and 6th graders at the school!

Help give our students an opportunity to learn a stringed instrument, chords, and the art of playing while singing.

Learning to play the ukulele is a fantastic building block for our students, who learn to play the recorder in grades 3 and 4 and currently continue that through their remaining two years at our school. Introducing ukuleles into our music curriculum would be a tremendous boost to student engagement and build the following skills for our older students:

-- Playing a guitar-like stringed instrument.

-- Reading chords.

-- Developing ear training.

-- Learning to sing while playing an instrument.

Most importantly, the wider variety of instruments we provide to our children, the greater enrichment they receive from music class, and the more they enjoy and learn. This deepens their lifelong appreciation for and enjoyment of music.

Need more convincing? Decades of research shows that music exposure and education benefits children in a wide range of ways: it encourages language development, executive functioning and the ability to concentrate, fine motor skills, and spatial-temporal intelligence — the kinds of skills that also aid career-seekers in architecture, engineering, math, art, and computer science. Some studies even show school-wide correlations between superior music education and higher test scores!

To implement this curriculum, we will need two class sets of Waterman concert-style ukuleles, as well as appropriate storage racks to be sure the instruments remain in good condition for many classes of students to come. Please give what you can today, and consider sharing this with your fellow music lovers AND fellow supporters of our Timber Lane Tigers.

We appreciate any and all support. Even the smallest donation can have a great impact. Thank you for investing in our students!