Deep Diving from Home

For the past couple of days, I have been working from home. Luckily, despite the many school closures, we still have plenty of work to be getting on with that doesn’t involve face to face teaching. Over the past couple of months Junior Jam office staff and instructors have been hard at work adapting, writing and rewriting all of our lesson plans and course content to better conform to the new Ofsted framework and to prepare our schools for subject specific deep dives. This ongoing task has provided us the perfect opportunity to improve and refresh our content and has opened doors to new subjects that we hope to develop and deliver in the not too distant future. This task has been a huge collaborative effort across all our departments and communication has been key. I think one of the main initial concerns with working from home is the loss of face to face contact and having the ability to spit ball ideas and conduct creative mind mapping meetings on a whim. However, this hasn’t proved a problem at all due to the perks of modern-day video conferencing and cloud-based working. This week I am getting stuck into our most recent addition to the music department, dhol drumming. Dhol drumming is an exciting way to learn music and covers a large portion of the music curriculum including- playing and performing in solo and ensemble contexts, improvising and composing using the inter related dimensions of music, listening with attention to detail, appreciate music drawn from different traditions and to use and understand staff and other musical notation. Through this course students not only learn to play the dhol drums but also delve into the culture and Punjabi rituals surrounding the instrument and Bhangra music. It is a fun and engaging way to improve student’s rhythm and dexterity and gives them an opportunity to make a lot of noise.