Drumming For Your Life is a program that aims to match rhythm with learning. It is largely based out of the Los Angeles area, but it expanded to five Kings County schools in May. Drumming For Your Life has several programs in a variety of subjects. But locally, Pioneer Union Elementary School District, Armona Union Elementary School District, Lakeside Union School District, Shelly Baird School and Kings Community School and Juvenile Center, used the company's Reading and Rhythm program.

The Reading and Rhythm Program offers a strategy educators can use to address the needs of struggling readers. Using rhythm to increase students' engagement and learning capacities, this program has improved the reading skills of more than 1,500 children in the greater Los Angeles area since 2002.

Reading and Rhythm sessions begin with "warm-up" group drumming exercises in which students tap out rhythms on a book, engaging them physiologically, cognitively and emotionally. The "pulse" exercise, which teaches students to follow a steady beat, induces focused relaxation, and unifies the group. Rather than getting "stuck" on unfamiliar words, students learn to use the rhythm to help them move fluidly through syllables in multisyllable words, and from word to word and sentence to sentence, working up to passages of increasing length, at gradually faster speeds.

After Steven Angel, Drumming For Your Life president, visited in May the local participating schools, several local educators noted an immediate increase in student reading performance.

Tamara Ravalin, Kings County Office of Education assistant superintendent of educational services said that many teachers saw a difference in one week. Since the expansion into Kings County included Drumming For Your Life's first time working with students with autism and other severe disabilities, it is a learning process for facilitators and schools.

"This is exciting for us as well as them," Ravalin said. "This program is very successful in developing fluency for reading in students. We are still learning how to adapt the program to students with certain types of disabilities."

Ravalin added that the rhythmic drumming exercises allowed some students to develop spelling skills for the first time, which she attributed to the concentration and focus provided by the exercises.

Drumming For Your Life was introduced to local educators by Kings County Special Education Local Plan Area Director Martina Sholiton, who previously worked in Los Angeles area schools, where she became familiar with the program.

Angel and other Drumming For Your Life facilitators will return to the area in September and each subsequent quarter to follow up on the program's development and success at each school. Angel hopes to expand the program to schools throughout the Valley and the state.

"It works because there is a system to it," Angel said. He added that drumming synchronizes a child's emotions with his cognitive thinking. "All of the walls and all the blockages that they have, we are tearing them all away."

The reporter can be reached at 583-2424

(July 30, 2008)