"DRUMS AND POEMS™"

Building Connections and Literacy Skills through Drumming

Drums and Poems is an exciting new program that helps children connect with each other and develop literacy skills through drumming and poetry. Drumming is central to many cultures, and pulls people together in jam sessions and celebrations around the world. The children in D&P workshops will find this noisy and energetic activity very engaging as they drum on found and recycled objects. D&P was created as a response in part to the fact that neuropsychologists have shown that rhythm helps children self-regulate.

Poetry, on the other hand, has long been a part of curricula because of its great potential for improving reading and writing skills. Unfortunately, many children find it unrelatable in a traditional educational setting. So we are pairing it with drumming as a tool to make this kind of learning more dynamic and more FUN. How do we connect drumming and poem-writing? Poems are based on rhythms, too. A song combines a melody with a beat, and a poem acts exactly as a song's lyrics might. 

In D&P, children will start to develop the drum beats first, and then find themselves building poems as they play with words. Because both the drumming and the spoken poetry will be communal activities, the children will have to work together to complete the poems. This is where they will build cooperation skills, and eventually relationships among their peers.

This pilot program at the Plympton School in Waltham, MA has just given its final performance. Here is a link to picture and some local coverage.

Future sessions will consist of ten weekly sessions or a daily program over the course of one or two weeks that children can sign up for. Also, there will be Drums and Poems trainings for staff at your facility after they have worked with us in a program.