Junior Music & Drama

Faced with any challenge, unforeseen positives often arise and this past year has been no different. The resilience, positivity, creativity and flexibility shown by the children has been astounding and has kept music at school very much alive.

The most challenging aspect of lockdown was the simple impossibility of being together to create and enjoy music. We missed our choirs, musical ensembles and concerts so much and this has really made us realise how important these aspects of life are to us and how lucky we are to be a part of such a busy, thriving musical community. Music really has the ability to bring people together and helps us to celebrate occasions within our school calendar.

The children displayed such strength of character during our period of online learning and some special moments definitely stand out: we had great fun with the Infants when we held a 10-minute super dash from our computer screens to find items around the house to make percussion instruments with, then bring them back for show and tell. I really enjoyed watching the children dashing past the computer screen as they found saucepans and wooden spoons, cardboard boxes and elastic bands to create a cacophony of different sounds in our online percussion orchestra!

The children threw themselves into online music tasks with gusto, composing raps, completing listening

tasks, learning new songs for our Chinese New Year celebrations and Black History Month, and sharing their thoughts, ideas and contributions of music they had heard/ created at home. Such was their love of performing to each other that we held many online concerts, becoming pros at being a respectful online audience and enjoying each other’s musical items.

Once we made it back into school, performing and singing together were slowly introduced back into our lives, leading up to the sparkling Nativity and Christmas films, the fantastic Year 4 Cats play, the wonderful Year 6 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and of course our Drama Festival which had all the children back on stage performing and enjoying themselves on a lovely sunny day on the field. It was so lovely to finally see parents back on site to share these moments with us.