Spring Break...Refresh, Relax, Re-energize
Three Quarters of my first year are already done and I can't believe my first year is almost done! Since my last post, I have been extremely busy with 5th and 6th Grade Mass Band (I'll go into more depth about that) as well as the third quarter slump that seems to hit the students. In addition to that, I have stayed busy with drum lessons as always, practicing a little bit everyday. Finally, reading for fun has never really been something that I have been into, but I am going to start to read more and hopefully find stuff I like to read about. It may be music related, or not. At this point I'm going to try reading for fun rather than truly "academic" reading which has always been the struggle for me. Throughout my posts, I'm going to try to talk about some of the books I've been reading.
In the district I work in, we are luck to be able to have our 5th and 6th grade students participate in a "Mass Band" performance. This is where 150-200 students combine to form one large group and perform music that has been prepared in class. For 6th Grade, we performed five songs that really pushed the students harder than they had been before. The five songs were:
Imperial Guard by: Elliot Del Borgo
Brontosaurus Blues by: David Wells
Extreme by: Rob Grice
Dark Adventure by: Ralph Ford
Let's Go Band by: Andrew Balent
For the most part, these songs were between a grade 1-1.5, but the amount of time that we had them for and some of the concepts that they introduced made accomplishing the songs difficult. Even with the challenging music, the concert that the students were able to accomplish made the parents, teachers, and other viewers very proud of their hard work.
With the 5th Grade students, because we have so many in the district, we had two separate days where half of the students rehearsed, and then performed a concert later that night. and the other half rehearsed and performed on a separate day. Having this many 5th grade students is definitely not a bad problem to have for a district! These students also worked very hard and found a new motivation to make it through the end of the school year. The 5th grade student performed 6 songs with the combination being partially from the book, and partially of "sheet music" songs. The songs that they played were:
Frere Jaques (Essential Elements)
Old McDonald had a Band (Essential Elements)
Blue Ribbon March by: Sam Feldstein
Rockin' the Blues by: Sam Feldstein & John O'Reilly
Attack of the Garden Gnomes by: Timothy Loest
Russian Song and Dance by: Andrew Balent
Let's Go Band by: Andrew Balent
Besides working so much lately, I have pushed myself to get back into reading for fun rather than reading because I needed to for a class, or for academia. The book that I have started to read lately is: Music without Words: A Memoir, by Philip Glass. So far I've only just read the first couple of chapters, but I'm really excited to continue to read and see some of the motivation and inspiration behind such a interesting and ground-breaking composer.
Thanks again to everyone who reads this, and hopefully there will be some new blog posts as well as some exciting new things in the future! Please stay up-to-date with my blogs and if you are interested in getting informed when a new post comes up, please subscribe on my website!
