Isabella Abbonizio. For the past few weeks, she has been slowly introducing your children to classical music and building their ability to recognize sounds, rhythms and instruments. Isabella joins our team in addition to our music specialist Evan, who will still be making music with your children each week.
Isabella, an Italian-born musician, researcher and educator, holds an M.A. in guitar performance from the Conservatory of Bologna and a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. During her doctoral studies, Isabella was a lecturer in musicology and music education at Roma Tre University, and since 2001 she has been teaching classical guitar, music theory, and music education privately and in schools from elementary to College level. In New York, she has been a visiting scholar at New York University (2011-2015) and is on the faculty of The Harlem School of the Arts. Her strong passion for education and the overwhelmingly positive responses from her students led her to start a music company, DalMaestro (http://dalmaestro.com). Now a mother of two children born in the last two years, Isabella is determined to develop a well-structured curriculum for teaching music fundamentals to young children, Fortissimo.
Isabella is working "through creative expression in song, rhythmic movement, and attentive listening," to show children how to keep a beat, stay in tune, coordinate movement, and follow a musical narration with carefully selected pieces of music such as Peter and The Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev, and In The Hall of the Mountain King by Peer Gynt. She is also working closely with BMS teachers as we embark on a special project to document the affect classical music has on young children. The Johns Hopkins School of Education has also done research on Music and Learning, and we are looking closely at work written by Chris Boyd Brewer to inform our own learning.
"Music will activate students mentally, physically, and emotionally and create learning states with enhance understanding of learning materials." -Chris Boyd Brewer
Every classroom will be playing classical music each morning and afternoon at specific times and taking note of differences in children's attention, thinking processes, movements and intention. We are very excited to start sharing these discoveries with you.
"Music stabilizes mental, physical and emotional rhythms to attain a state of deep concentration and focus in which large amounts of content information can be processed and learned." -Chris Boyd Brewer
In addition, we are working on a special workshop for parents in early May with Isabella so that you can be an active participant in this music program and can extend this information at home with your child.
Here's a link to the article on the Johns Hopkins University website:
http://www.education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/strategies/topics/Arts%20in%20Education/brewer.htm