Music Class

For eight autumn seasons now, I’ve been blessed to get to teach music class for families of preschoolers in assisted living facilities.  Each week families bring their small children and we sing, dance, pretend and have a marvelous time interacting with the residents who live there. I teach the classes on Thursday and Friday mornings, and although we do almost exactly the same activities in each place, the residents and atmosphere of the buildings are very different.

On Friday mornings we get to visit with “grandmas and grandpas” who can still live fairly independently.  They love seeing  the kids and many of them have been coming for years and have favorite kids that they love to watch for.  These residents love to have the children bring them instruments and they sing and play along, and do all the things the kids do from their chairs, walkers parked nearby in case they need to make a quick escape for one reason or another.  They love holding babies and giggling about how energetic those little people are.  The building and its people that we see each Friday is dear to my heart.

On Thursday we visit with residents at an advanced care assisted living home.  Many of these residents have dementia and are confused.  Others have had strokes or have major mobility issues.  Sometimes a grandma who was at the Friday building will pop up in the Thursday building after a health episode of one sort or another.  Almost all of these residents use a wheel chair and many of them fall asleep waiting for the kids to arrive.  When the kids come in, though, it’s absolutely amazing.  Nearly all of them just perk up!  They might forget that we come each week, but when they see the kids, they are alert and present in the moment (if they are awake!).  A lot of them can’t hold an instrument in their hands because their hands don’t always work, but the ones that can, do, and they love to jingle and shake right along.  They coo at the babies.   They tell us about all the children they have raised.  Some of them have sharp minds but bodies that don’t work.  Some of them have fuzzy minds and bodies that do work a little better.  Sometimes they are GROUCHY with each other when they get wheeled down to the big room before any of the families arrive, but they are always so happy to see little kids.  They smile.  They laugh.  One grandma in a yellow sweatshirt actually sang all the songs right along with me last week, which was amazing.  Another grandma scooted her wheelchair all the way across the room to get a colorful ribbon that she spied from a distance.  One day a grandma who used a walker stood right up and joined us in a little dance.

Sometimes on a Thursday or Friday morning I leave my house in a frenzy, my car loaded with bins of instruments, ribbons, scarves.  Sometimes I feel grouchy because I’m having a bad morning.  Sometimes I wonder why I am still teaching preschool music classes, hauling all these instruments around.   Does this really do any good?  Nearly always on those mornings something special happens.  A grandma or grandpa tells me how happy the kids make them.  A kid gives me a big hug.  A parent tells me how their little one goes home and pretends to be Miss Rachel, and lines up a bunch of stuffed animals to have “music class.”  A child brings me a note about the antarctic animals we are singing about, complete with pictures and wonderful emergent literacy in their own handwriting.  I see a twinkle in the wrinkle encased  bright eyes of someone whose eyes are not normally bright.

I am convinced that the blessings I receive are far, far greater than those I give away.  I think it’s a win-win morning for everyone.  I’m pretty sure I will continue teaching these special classes that bring together the youngest and oldest people in such a unique way until there is some big, crazy reason that prevents me from doing it any more.  I love rolling in with my “red wagon of musical goodness,”  which is what the kids who live with me have termed the folding red wagon I zip around with.