A new kind of holiday concert

Greetings from the K-6 music classroom. These past few months, students have been working hard on a variety of different skills, including singing, listening to and analyzing different musical examples, playing numerous instruments, learning different music vocabulary words, and reading musical notation.

However, our biggest event this past semester was the Holiday Concert, though it looked different than it did in years past. Students in 4-year-old kindergarten through fifth grade participated, and were able to share with parents and community members all that they’ve learned these past months by performing a virtual concert.

We recorded our performance and put the videos on the school website for everyone to watch. With the songs, students were able to do sign language, show creative movement using colorful scarves, and play instruments such as handbells, boomwhackers, xylophones, metallophones, wood blocks, and jingle bells. It was a wonderful event, and the students should be very proud of their performance – they did a fantastic job! In sixth grade music survey class, we have been doing different instrument activities as well like playing hand drums, mallet instruments, recorders, ukuleles and boomwhackers. We have been reading sheet music and performing multiple parts at the same time -- we’ve created our own unique band! We have also been learning about how music has evolved throughout history, and how it has changed from simple singing to playing instruments to what we hear on the radio today.