Wilcannia Central School

Teachers easily freak out feeling they don’t have the skills to teach music. We don’t have to be trained in music, because the teacher guidance material is great!

I love music and I feel it should be in every classroom every day. The visit from SYO and access to the resources on Learning For Good has engaged our entire community, and has laid the groundwork for a new approach to education.  I think it supports them to engage and to support behaviour. I have noticed a difference with the children’s engagement this year as I have used more music.

Our involvement with Learning For Good started with a visit from the Sydney Youth Orchestras to our tiny town of 500 people in 2023.

Neither the school children nor I had ever seen an orchestra - it was such a cool experience!  The SYO worked with us on a song that had been written by one of our local artists, and it was performed by them and our little school choir (who had never sung to an audience before).  Then, we all went to the civic centre together and performed in front of 400 people – which for us, is huge!

This experience completely opened our eyes to the fact that yes, we can benefit in the same way that city schools do.

At the start of the year there was one boy who was not engaged at all, but now with music in our regular classroom activities, he’s fully engaged! He loves to join in with the singing and dancing that I implement to various subjects. That, to me, has been the most noticeable change in using music and I feel that any resource that is going to upskill a teacher in delivering that is really valuable.

The resources we accessed on the Learning For Good platform provided a connection to the SYO visit.  I would like to use the resources to map into our lessons across primary and secondary school. It provides an underpinning knowledge and understanding of the positive effect of the arts in education.