I always enjoy visiting this school. The children are very lively and none are confined to wheelchairs so we can use all of our equipment. I did three hour long sessions with  a fairly standard drum Circle approach. We made some noise we created a beat we created rhythms from their favourite foods and we had lots of volunteers to come in the middle and facilitate starts and stops, loud and soft and  Giant jumps.
With each group I used the Hang to teach Oleh oh

This is where the day strayed into the extra ordinary. A boy, Janek, with Downs Syndrome from the Congo who has been in this country for a year asked to play the hang. Normally I might let a couple have a go but I had been watching this young man and he had been displaying a lot of natural rhythm and was clearly in a state of bliss around drums.
So I popped it in his lap and said OK you play and we will all sing, I gave him the hang and picked up a djembe. Straight away he had a lovely simple rhythm going, I grooved quietly on the djembe and we all sang the song a couple of times. Then he started to improvise with his voice, at first he used the phrases from the song and then all sorts of other vocal rhythmic phrases started to come in all creating wonderful cross rhythms with the simple groove he was keeping up on the hang.I got quieter he got louder and I looked around the room at the faces of the others. Everyone was completely entranced, several of the adults had tears in their eyes. We just quietly played along in awe. It could have been several minutes before he crowned the whole thing with a wonderful signal type phrase with his voice and the hang and spread his arms in a stop signal.

After that Janek came to the remaining session as well and helped us groove along. Now came the funniest thing. I had assumed while I  was listening to him earlier that he was remembering vocal phrases from his own country and using them. But he gave us another little show and we all realised he had in fact been improvising using all the rhythmic phrases we had made up during the day, The rhythmic way he was using them had made them unrecognisable so what i had assumed were african phrases were in fact " macaroni cheese, macaroni cheese,  chips , chips, roast beef yorkshire pudding."

had to laugh!
Thanks for a great day everyone.