Use music to teach academic skills to teens in inpatient treatment.David Lyon

With proper funding, I will be able to buy guitars, bass, keyboards and drum equipment as well as some recording equipment and software for editing.  The students will then be taught basic academic skills like fractions-through the process of playing music, i.e. learning to subdivide the beat into half, quarter, eighth and sixteenth notes etc.  All the while, students will also be learning to play instruments in an ensemble setting.  This will target and boost academic achievement on standardized tests and earn them high school credit, which they desperately need.  Various lesson plans include, but are not limited to, creative writing, the harmonic overtone series, social contexts for music, spiritual contexts of music and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.  This is a pilot project for one specific treatment center but can be expanded and used in others as well.