Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Music & Literacy - Lucy's blog














Our Music & Literacy project Moving on with Music started this week at Stewart Headlam Primary School in Tower Hamlets. Here's what Lucy had to say about day three:

Day 3 and our noses are raw and our hands are sore... not from the dreaded lurg but from the continuous applications of anti-bacterial gel we are glooping on ourselves, and yes, we received medical advise to put it round our noses!
The temperatures are soaring but despite this we are piecing together several glorious creations to perform at tomorrow's leaver's assembly.

The original plan was to work with the children for five days, but this got reduced to four in both schools due to outside visits. There is always a dilemma when planning a series of workshops, whether to be performance driven or enjoy the journey rather than the arrival. We hoped to keep this as creative and free as possible because the year 6 children are at the end of their curriculum driven timetable, but having a big assembly to prepare for and a reduced time to work with, we have had to be more prescriptive than we had hoped.

We have had a wonderful new song written for us by guitarist/songwriter Pete Walton called "Moving On" which will receive its first ever performance tomorrow at Stewart Headlam, and a second version next Friday at Redlands School. We are putting together a school riff by collecting phrases straight from the classroom floor, throwing them up in the air, and catching them on drum beat. There are some mighty clever rhythm tricks and a "Hello" song neatly turned into a "Goodbye" one to bookend the assembly. And there is so, so much more we could have done if we had had another week.. but that is for another time.

Probably more children will return from their sickbeds tomorrow, and we have two extra musicians joining us, Viking Karl Sorrenson on clarinet and sax, and multi instrumentalist and maverick, Dave Powell on tuba/accordion and...... well, the other instrument is a surprise!!! You'll see the photos tomorrow.

Sadly, due to the day being knocked of the timetable for us, we are losing Baden tomorrow, our word magician. We'll try to persuade him to put one of his favorite poems online, the one the children liked best. After much noisy persuasion he even sang a verse of it!

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