Music is beneficial to all ages
I am so grateful to reporter Mark Zimmaro for his article on a unique private music school’s newest establishment in our community (“New music house in the Italian Market”). The article describes the opening of a new branch of Mister John’s Music School on 8th Street in the Italian Market area. Classes for adults and children as young as infants will be provided in a hundred-year-old building. Even other school options for all ages will be available. That’s just wonderful.
Throughout my long career as a teacher, I was aware of how the arts, especially music, help develop skills in the brains of growing children. Preschool children could, for example, sing the Alphabet Song to reinforce their memory of the letters in correct order.
There were, in those days, always music and movement around to fit the subject. When, for example, I was involved in an elementary school Latin program, I trained the students to sing in Latin plays like “Tres Porci Parvi” (“The Three Little Pigs”). It made the language come alive for them.
I especially like that this program is offered even to infants and toddlers. Children that young thrive on music to enhance their intellectual development.
All creative art, but especially music, is conducive to positive mental and social growth in humans of all ages. It is truly encouraging to know we have an expanding establishment that offers musical art to everyone from babies to adults. Bravo.
Gloria C. Endres
Take guns away from the unstable
The Maine mass shooting that happened on Oct. 25 is devastating. It is frightfully horrendous that a shooting rampage can still happen today in America.
Maine has a yellow flag law that is defined as a person who is taken into protective custody by police and brought to a hospital. Officers fill out a statement arguing that they’ve determined a person is a danger to themselves or others and how they know the person has access to a weapon.
Even with the yellow flag law in order it does not take away this mass shooting with Card’s AR-15 rifle. Most of these firearms have to be taken off the streets, because some of these firearms will be used as weapons by people who are considered mentally unstable and not for self defense.
The City of Philadelphia should take into consideration the yellow flag law.
Alim Howell
