At a performance last semester at Brandon High School, Yates Elementary School music teacher Katie Thomas spoke proudly of her student drummers and the value she sees in the World Music Drumming initiative.
“They get so much confidence” playing the drums, Thomas said of her students. “They’re not as vulnerable as they would be if they were singing. You can hide more behind the drum, but you’re also expressing yourself and gaining confidence.”
Thomas said she heard about the World Music Drumming cross-cultural curriculum as an intern, before her first year of teaching in the 2019-20 school year. She said she learned more about the program with a grant to study the program in Naples.
The program now is part of Thomas’ busy teaching schedule at her Title I school, which includes five before and after-school ensembles. The other ensembles are for chorus, hand chimes, modern band and an ‘Instruments of Change Band’ that teaches fifth graders trumpet and clarinet.
In a post she wrote for the Florida Elementary Music Educators Association in September 2024, Thomas said she takes seriously her job to build “lifelong music learners” and her principal’s encouragement “to make positive phone calls home for students, to begin to build relationships with our families.”
Thomas said she focused not just on the “obvious calls” for “students who get the solos or who are in the ensembles,” but also for the students “who aren’t front and center” but are somewhere in the middle. As a result, students “who had never been told they were good at something or felt seen before,” Thomas said, “now feel like they belong in our music class family.”
Thomas, with Yates Principal Lisa Varnum, was at the school district’s Family and Community Education (FACE) Academy at Brandon High in November 2024. The inaugural event for the districtwide initiative included workshops and community exhibitors, and it preceded the ensemble’s planned performance at the Winter Wonderland event at Sadie Park in December.
Thomas, who is a FACE ambassador at Yates, said drumming makes music accessible to all, and that, as with other music groups, requires “students to work together to sound like one.”
At Yates, “we’re all one big music family,” Thomas said. “From the moment you greet [the students] at the door, they just know that they’re at home when they’re in the music room.”
Yates Elementary is at 301 Kingsway Rd. in Brandon. Call 813-744-8179. Visit World Music Drumming www.worldmusicdrumming.com for more on the multifaceted music experience aligned with West African, Caribbean and Latin drumming and singing traditions.
