Music

JUNIOR SCHOOL

Music

2020 has been a wonderful year of building on skills, experimentation and knowledge acquisition by girls in the Junior School. It has been brilliant to see the girls improving so much as musicians this year and enjoying singing and playing their musical instruments in and out of lockdown!

The resilience and resourcefulness of our girls has really shone through this year. Under lockdown, we had girls in our Huia Whānau singing pop songs while playing percussion parts on plastic cups and Year 1s performing on Māori tapping sticks which they made themselves. Year 2s showed fabulous creativity by making their own percussion instruments at home and Year 4s studied the orchestral work, ‘Peter and the Wolf’, from a fabulous YouTube video.

For many Year groups, 2020 provided an excellent opportunity to learn how to use apps for Music creation. These included Incredibox and Garageband, just to name a few. Music Technology is a brilliant way of fostering creativity for our girls as they manipulate core elements of music such as melody, rhythm and form. There are certainly a few Mums and Dads in the Junior School who now have some original ringtones loaded onto their mobile phones, courtesy of their daughters! The instrumental programme in the Junior school has been continuing to build this year. As well as having all girls in Years 5 and 6 on Clarinet and Saxophone, we now have girls learning Trumpet and Trombone and making an incredible contribution to classroom bands on these instruments. Many girls in Year 6 have started attending Honours Band rehearsals during Term 4 this year to prepare themselves as they move into Senior School co-curricular groups for 2021. Go Year 6s! Music lessons remain a weekly highlight for our girls in the Junior School and have helped keep our girls happy and buoyant throughout the year. We would like to send out a huge thank you to all the parents for supporting their daughters so well at home with their instrument practice and with their online learning. —Andrew Stewart