SDC Summer Music Program | Summer 2026
Edward Li (Co-President of Speak With Arts)
When I began designing the summer music classes at SDC, I thought one of my main jobs was to plan sufficiently. Our two Spring Camp trial sessions had already shown us that real instruments, movement, and visual activities could work well, so I built each one-hour summer class around roughly five activities. On paper, the structure made sense: there was enough variety to keep the class moving, and every activity had a purpose.
The summer program went well. The SDC supervisors were very supportive, and over time I noticed many of the children becoming more attentive, more comfortable interacting with us, and participating in different ways. More importantly, they seemed to enjoy the classes, and SDC was interested in continuing the program. However, what stayed with me most was how often the children changed what I thought a successful class should look like.
The first thing that changed was the schedule. Although I had planned about five activities for each class, the children did not experience time according to my lesson plan. Sometimes a child became completely absorbed in an instrument or activity just when I was supposed to move on. At first, I was conscious of everything we were not getting to, but I began asking what I was actually trying to accomplish. If a child was focused, interacting, and enjoying an activity, interrupting that moment simply to complete all five parts of the lesson did not make much sense.
As a result, most classes eventually included only two or three major activities. When the children were interested in something, we stayed with it longer. When an activity was not connecting with them, we moved on. I did not stop making lesson plans, but I stopped treating the plan as the definition of a successful lesson.
Real instruments continued to be one of the strongest parts of the program. Rather than only showing pictures or videos, we demonstrated how instruments produced sound, played them live, and gave the children opportunities to touch and try them when appropriate. The same instrument, however, could lead to very different responses. Some children wanted to try it immediately, while others preferred to watch first. Some communicated through questions or eye contact, while others said very little but remained focused on what we were doing.
Earlier, I probably would have described the children who immediately reached for an instrument as more engaged. As the classes continued, I became less certain. Watching closely could also be a form of participation, as could listening or approaching an instrument only after observing someone else use it. Instead of trying to make every child participate in the same visible way, I became more interested in creating enough ways for each child to enter the activity.
Another change came when we began giving the children more influence over what happened in class. We added live music requests and asked what they wanted to hear rather than deciding everything ourselves. It was a simple adjustment, but their choices now shaped part of the class. That made me wonder whether participation could go further than choosing or trying an instrument: could the children make one themselves?
I had the chance to test that idea on July 30, when I was responsible for the music station at SDC's Summer Camp. The station included movement games based on sound, a musical passing game, and an activity where children made egg shakers. They chose materials, filled and decorated plastic eggs, experimented with the sounds they had created, and then used the finished shakers to play rhythms. The activity was especially successful because the children were involved in nearly every part of the process, from making choices to creating an object they could then use for music.
That experience gave me confidence to bring instrument-making into the formal curriculum. The third summer music class was also the first session I taught on my own, so I prepared plastic eggs, beans, and decorations and adapted the activity for the classroom. The children spent a long time making their shakers, and at the end we used them together to create rhythms. The response was very positive, including from the SDC supervising instructor. Some experiences had shown me what needed to change in my original design; this one showed me what was worth developing further.
The fourth class challenged another assumption. Music and visual art had been part of my original curriculum idea, and I wanted to connect them more directly by showing how a melody could become a visual line, rising or falling with the music. The connection seemed simple to me, but the students did not really respond to the example I demonstrated. My first thought was that I needed to explain it more clearly. Instead, I eventually stopped showing them what their drawings were supposed to look like and played a piece of classical music while encouraging them to draw whatever they wanted.
At first, honestly, I thought they were just drawing randomly because their pictures looked nothing like the musical contours I had demonstrated. However, the longer I watched, the less certain I became. Different choices of color, repeated shapes, patterns, and kinds of movement appeared across the page, and no two drawings approached the music in the same way.
I began wondering whether I had been evaluating the wrong thing. I had been asking whether the children understood my way of translating music into an image, rather than asking what the music made them want to put on the page. Their drawings did not need to resemble my example to be meaningful, and once I stopped looking for the response I expected, I could see something much more individual in what they were creating.
At the beginning of the summer, I thought good curriculum design mostly meant anticipating what students would need and preparing the right activities in advance. Preparation still matters to me; I would not want to walk into a class without structure, materials, or a reason for what I was doing. What changed was how attached I was to that structure.
The children stayed with activities longer than I expected, showed interest in instruments in different ways, responded more strongly when they could choose and create, and sometimes turned an activity into something different from what I had imagined. Some of those responses told me to change an idea, while others showed me what was worth building on.
For the next version of the program, I want to create more opportunities for active participation through simple instruments, small percussion instruments and props, movement, choice, and open-ended ways of responding to music. I also want to leave more space in each class for an activity to become something I did not plan.
I still believe a good class needs a plan. What changed over the summer was my understanding of what that plan was for. It was not something the children needed to follow exactly; instead, it was a starting point that had to keep changing as I learned how they wanted to participate.