“Everyone learns, and everyone wins!”
By Kristin Clark Taylor
The First Sighting
When Marissa Colón looks back on her experiences with QuaverMusic, she begins at the beginning.
Literally.
Colón, a music teacher at Sabal Palm Elementary in Collier County, Florida, began using Quaver in her classroom when the company was still in its infancy – before the resource was even available online.
Over the years, she’s seen the curriculum evolve and expand at a meteoric rate.
Today, she’s excited about taking us down Memory Lane to describe that special moment when she first encountered Quaver.
“I was at a music education conference many, many years ago,” she recalls enthusiastically, “and suddenly, there it was!”
Her memory of that first sighting was both exciting and impactful.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this before.’”
As soon as she returned from the conference, Colón says she went directly to her Fine Arts Supervisor with a plea to get this “really cool” new resource into the school.
It worked.
Shortly thereafter, her school received a box of Quaver DVDs and a free one-year subscription for the games, she says, the gratitude still shining in her voice.
“I still have that original box from all those years ago!” she says proudly, “and I still remember how special it felt to be one of the first schools to try it out.”
Her students were just as thrilled as she was.
“They responded to it immediately,” she says.
“I’ll never forget how they were just kind of gazing at the videos, really soaking it all in.”
It dawned on her, as she continued to observe their level of engagement and intrigue, “that they’d probably never seen anything like it before, either!”
It was a first for everyone … but definitely not the last.
In fact, it was only the beginning.
Customization, Culture, and Standards Alignment
Since those early days, Quaver has evolved into an innovative, cloud-based platform impacting more than ten million students in all fifty states and forty-four countries, the leader in online music education.
Colón says her students today are equally enthusiastic and perhaps even more deeply engaged, proof positive that Quaver has firmly established itself as both an enduring and ground-breaking classroom resource — definitely not an easy feat to achieve.
“To this very day, I still use a lot of the Quaver Essentials, just like I did at the very beginning,” she says, “but now I have the full, amazing curriculum that they’re somehow always improving.”
Colón says she loves customizing the lessons in order to provide her students with exactly what they need.
She cites another important benefit: The fact that the lessons are carefully aligned to Florida standards.
“I don’t have to spend time trying to figure out which activities align with which standards,” she says with gratitude and relief, “because I know Quaver has it all covered, and this gives me more time with my students.”
These days, Quaver’s uber-popular song “You-Nique” is the hands-down favorite in Colón’s classroom, and she says she plays it as part of the warm-up in every single class.
Marissa Colón, a music teacher at Sabal Palm Elementary in Collier County, Florida, points to Quaver’s stratospherically popular song “You-Nique” as a class favorite!
Sabal Palm Elementary has a very high ELL population, particularly with students from Cuba, Colón explains, so she appreciates being able to play many of the songs in both English and Spanish.
“’You-Nique’” is a song that makes everybody feel special,” she says with genuine appreciation in her voice, “and it really gives our Spanish-speaking students a sense of belonging, too.”
The bilingual songs have an added benefit.
“After a very short period,” Colón observes, “my English-speaking students are singing in Spanish, and my Spanish speakers are singing in English – with comprehension!”
Her next statement is about as bright and sunny as the Florida sky itself:
“With Quaver in my classroom, “everyone learns, and everyone wins!
Want to get this winning resource into your school? Go to QuaverEd.com/Music to find out how!
Kristin Clark Taylor is an author and a journalist.
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