22 Jan Drumming Forward Program, Juvenile Treatment Center, South Lake Tahoe, 1st Session, Jan. 2017
Saturday, January 21st, 2017, I delivered for the first time, my At-Risk Youth Empowerment Program, “Drumming Forward – One Beat At A Time”.
The response from the 12 youth who are participating in the program was just great! In fact, better than I expected and I was so pleased.
Four years ago, I was trained for this type of drum circle work in a program called, DRUMBEAT (Discovering, Relationships Using Music, Behavior, Emotions, Attitudes and Thoughts).
I am a certified DRUMBEAT facilitator and I have delivered the program many times over the last four years. DRUMBEAT is a fabulous program and works so well with elementary and middle school ages, but for the youth in the South Lake Tahoe Juvenile Treatment Center, I have found I needed to make changes to the program. Because I re-wrote most of the curriculum, I felt I needed to call it something different, hence, Drumming Forward was created.
Of course, I use a similar format for presenting the lessons, analogies and activities within in the drum circle, but what I have added is mindfulness, life design strategies and we play traditional African Rhythms.
Introducing mindfulness both informal and formal was a huge hit. I was able to do a guided meditation with the kids for 5 minutes and they loved it! They actual requested a longer period of time. My goal is to increase our time every week.
I will continue to blog our progress and experience as we go along. This is a 7-week program. We meet once a week for 1.5 hrs.
Till next time,
Drum On,
Drumchik