This week I was delighted to see our year 1 students tackling the keyboard in their lessons with Mrs. Bailey. I saw many refining their fine motor skills and heard some excellent melodies performed by the class. This is an excellent start to this half of Term 1 for these talented students. In year 3, our students have been exploring, ‘The Rite of Spring’ by Stravinsky–one of the Julliard Core Works. Learning engagements have focused on the construction of melodies and students experimented with creating their own phrases using fragmentary building blocks. I observed these classes writing melodies on their own manuscript paper with neatness and precision–it was hard to believe they were year 3 students!
We are also pleased how well the rehearsals are progressing for the Christmas performance based on Dickens's, ‘A Christmas Carol’. The students have devised the script and have worked collaboratively to choreograph the more physical theatre sections that portray the key parts of the novel; such as the arrival of the three ghosts, Christmas Past, Present and Future. I have been so impressed by how well the students have collaborated in such a creative manner. It has been fantastic to see the transfer of the skills acquired as a result of the Juilliard approach in lessons to their CCA learning. Watch out for information very soon for this performance date at the end of November.