JOY is a kindergartener playing the violin.

Hello Friends of JOY!

Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season full of light, rest, and renewal. I have returned, once again, to give you an update on our project and what we are up to here in Oregon!

We ended 2020 with two successful, physically distanced, and COVID-19 friendly concerts at the Newberg Friends Center for our After School Orchestras. Both concerts were streamed over Zoom and members of the community and family from afar tuned in to watch our Beginning and Intermediate orchestras perform music we had been preparing over the course of six weeks. Both groups had learned their music in those six weeks in both online and in-person platforms, and it was so much fun and kept us on our toes! 

Below, I’ve included unlisted YouTube links to those performances for your viewing. 

In November, our In-School violin students were able to take home materials to engage with learning violin online! Edwards Kindergarteners each got to take home their box violin kits and First Graders were able to sign up to take home a JOY-owned violin to engage with violin activities as part of their music class. Thank you to both Edwards Elementary and Ace Hardware for partially donating supplies to create the box violin kits, including paint sticks, scissors, printer and construction paper, and glue sticks. 

As we look ahead to the new year, JOY has the following goals:

• Digging deeper into our El Sistema roots. As an ESUSA member organization, we have concrete plans that all JOY staff attend monthly El Sistema meetings that cover a variety of topics: from equity in the classroom, to public school partnerships, and to collaborating with other Chief Executives in El Sistema programs. We also have four people from JOY and the Yamhill Enrichment Society (YES) registered for their annual Symposium and Seminario which will run from February 15-19th online. We are so excited to continue to grow in our understanding of what it means to “walk the walk” of accessibility and equity for all our students and their families. 

• Greater community outreach and support. With the start of the school year behind us and the end of the pandemic coming closer with each vaccine, JOY is re-launching our parent group and has plans for more intentionally supporting parents and families in our community going through health problems, job transitions, or other difficulties. In this, we hope to use the resources we have to the best of our ability to lift others up. 

• Planning for JOY Project expansion. This calendar year will largely be spent doing projects and applying for large grants to allow for the addition of two JOY orchestra sites by Fall 2022. Based on the successes of our program at Edwards since it was started in 2017, we are excited to continue expanding access to high quality music programs in our county! We are also planning to add a third orchestra for our Edwards After-School program for the fall, which will then mean we will serve students in grades K-4. 

As you can see, we are entering a chapter of growth at JOY and it means that this year will be full of hard work. Yet, the light that is the support of our families and the schools, have made this possible for us to keep going all of these years. Without them, we would not be here and wouldn’t be contemplating further growth in the coming two years. 

As always, dear friend of JOY, thank you for your support of our project! If you are curious about what we do with JOY, please visit our website below to read more. We appreciate your ongoing support of our programs!

With a JOY-ful Heart,

Danielle Howard Dye

Links:

• JOY Intermediate Orchestra- Winter Concert 2020
• JOY Beginning Orchestra- Winter Concert 2020
• Learn more about the JOY Project

Hello Friends of JOY!

Over the summer, the JOY team has worked on plans to prepare for the beginning of the school year. We entered summer with the hope that in the fall, we would be able to rehearse at the Elementary School music room like normal. As numbers of COVID-19 cases in our region continued to be too high, our local district had to make the plan in early August to start the school year with Comprehensive Distance Learning (CDL) instead of a hybrid plan. 

Because of this shift online, that meant JOY had to come up with a plan for our options to make rehearsals and learning accessible. We also are tasked with making sure we keep our enrollment high so we can continue the momentum we’ve worked hard over the years to build. Many music programs across the state and nation, be it in-school or otherwise, are also facing these challenges too.

In the midst of the uncertainties of the fall that we had faced, we decided at the end of the school year that we would continue planning for a first-annual JOY Summer Day Camp. During the week of August 24-28th, 12 of our returning JOY orchestra students joined us at the Newberg Friends Center for physically distanced rehearsals and music activities that ended with a concert at the end of the week. It was a huge success! The pictures I have attached below are some vignettes of that week, which I hope you enjoy. 

Now you’re probably wondering, “How did you get a group of incoming third graders to physically distance, wear masks, and make good choices?” Ultimately, how we designed the summer camp was in coordination with state and local guidelines as well as additional advice and ideas from local music teachers. 

First, we made sure the floors in our classrooms were set up with tape markings (6) feet apart and made sure chairs and stands were set up before students arrived so contact between students was reduced. At the end of each day, our team would sanitize chairs and stands with a water and bleach mixture.

Second, we included in our camp activities games that wouldn’t require close proximity between students and encouraged students to spread their “eagle wings” whenever they were too close to someone else. We also had designated times in small, closely monitored, socially distant groups that our kids could be outdoors and take a mask break. 

Third, we spent most of the day of camp in two, smaller groups so we could better monitor student activity. We also had assigned a teacher to lead each group with a counselor to limit large groups of students for most of the day.

Finally, as part of contact tracing and general local and state guidelines, we took temperatures each morning for all students who came in and screened for symptoms. This only covers some of the measures we took, but as a result we have had zero cases of coronavirus come up in our group. Our tedious efforts were absolutely worth their while and proved that they work. 

I think all of us teachers, students, and parents were struck at how impactful and important this summer camp was for all of us. After hearing positive parent feedback, it became clear more than ever that we would need to plan a way to play in-person together for the fall. 

Now, here we are. This week we were confirmed to begin using the Newberg Friends Center space again for our After-School Orchestras, which is exciting. We are gearing up to get our Intermediate Orchestra, who attended Summer Camp, started for hybrid learning next week. Up until then, we have been working with families about getting set up for our new Google Classroom site and doing one-on-one private lessons over video while we ironed out details of our rehearsal location. 

In the next couple of weeks, we plan to start 14 Beginning orchestra students for in-person rehearsals while we reopen enrollment to second grade families. I’m hopeful that we can get at least 30 students enrolled in our Beginning Orchestra by the start of November, so we are planning a way to make that happen in coordination with my co-teacher Julia Pridavka and Edwards music teachers Janis Dodson and Beth Randolph. We’re also going to work with our parent group to help promote program enrollment in the school!

As it happens, Janis, Julia, and Beth are planning activities for the JOY In-School Violin program. Our kindergarteners will have the opportunity to put together box violins at home through kits that YES (the Yamhill Enrichment Society) and JOY are providing. Julia, who is our Site Director and Violin Teaching Artist, will also be instructing kids and families through online learning how to put their violins together. In the meantime, we are still developing curriculum for our first graders, who at this point would normally play on real violins, to give meaningful instruction through remote learning. 

Friends, this season is such an interesting one to be in as a musician, teacher, and program coordinator. I’m sure you are here with me too. If I have learned anything, it’s that when times are difficult, it is an opportunity to creatively reimagine what you can do to make something work. While COVID-19 related closures since March have made teaching music more challenging, and have revealed inequities based on race or socioeconomic status, it has still posed an opportunity to be imaginative in how we teach and how we make programs like ours accessible. 

This move to hybrid learning couldn’t have been done without the support of parents, an amazing JOY teaching team, and YES. I am also thankful for you all for keeping up with us and continuing to support our efforts to create access to high quality music education in Yamhill County!

I am so thankful for the support we have and hope to grow that support as we welcome new families to our program.

With a JOY-ful heart,

Danielle Howard Dye

Links:

• Yamhill Enrichment Society (YES) website
• JOY was in the news this month! Read the article here.