YONKERS PUBLIC SCHOOLS

SPECIAL EDUCATION TRAINING RESOURCE CENTER
ADMINISTRATIVE ANNEX
John Burroughs Junior High School
150 Rockland Avenue
Yonkers, New York 10705
(914) 376-8208

Project Director
Ann Braio

Training Specialists
Joan Malanga
Samuel M. Brown

To whom it may concern:

A serious student who takes this course to learn to play the piano will achieve that goal. But the experience of this course of study will accomplish much more than provide the skill of learning to playa musical instrument. It imbues in the participant the principles of learning.

This course does for learning what Latin does for English. Anyone who has not mastered a grammatical and/or syntactic foundation in English develops it by studying Latin, and carries the skills to any other language studied.

The principles learned in this music course will be carried over into all other areas. All the principles of Montessori are embodied in this music course. It is a system of individual learning wherein the student develops self discipline through the self mastery gained by self-evaluation. It is a sequential skills approach where the student progresses at an individual rate of speed.

From the very first lesson the student develops visual, auditory, memory, and tactile skills. Because the course is one in which the participant goes slowly or as rapidly as is comfortable, and because the skills are sequential and there is  provision for evaluation of skill mastery before progressing to another learning level, gaps can be filled in. Weaker learning areas are strengthened because all approaches are used e.g. visual memory, visual imagery, auditory  discrimination, visual motor memory, and visual motor integration. This can be very helpful to people with learning disabilities.

Sincerely,
Ann Braio