Community Arts Blog Posts

Music in the Community:

Music helps to bring communities together and enables people to enjoy and learn from making music with each other. It can help bring people together and sort out differences in the community.

A good example of this would be The University of Sheffield putting music projects together to help expand children’s knowledge beyond the classroom and help make connections throughout the city.

Not only does community music benefit the community but it also benefits the practitioners and organisations that put the projects together because it helps them gain new skills as well as helping them gain new experiences.

Community Arts Blog:

7th January - 1st Planning Meeting

First meeting we started planning what we were going to deliver the following week at the school. We did this by coming up with ideas and activities we could do to get the school children all involved and to introduce ourselves and make it an enjoyable first week.

14th January - 1st Week at the School

I wasn't in for this session but I spoke to the group afterwards and they explained that this session was used to introduce themselves to the school children and play warm up music games.

21st January - Planning Meeting

This week we starting planning what songs we were going to teach the school children and the song that got chosen as a group was Pompeii by Bastille. We then started learning the parts ourselves so we could show the school class what we were going to be teach them over the next couple of weeks. We also starting getting all the resources we were going to need to teach them like song lyrics.

We chose Pompeii because all the school children knew the song and it was an easy song for them to learn.

28th January - Week at the School

This week we went to the school and to start the session off we did warm ups and then we played our cover of Pompeii to them and explained that we were going to be teaching them how to play the song depending on what instrument they wanted to learn. We then split them up into groups and I had the percussion group.

I spent this session getting them to the listen to different percussion instruments by playing little listening games with them. I also taught them some dynamics by holding up different cards that had different dynamics on them and getting them to play out the dynamic after I explained the meaning of each one.

4th February - Planning Meeting

This week we started discussing other ideas we could use for this concert at the school as some of the group thought it was going to be hard for us to teach 3 songs to the school children in such a small period of time. This then begun a heated debate as not everyone agreed with each other, we managed to sort out what we were going to be doing the next time we were at the school but we were still unsure about what to do for the show.

11th February - Week at the School

This week the original idea we had to teach at the school ended up changing last minute when our lecturer stepped in and gave us a few ideas and told us what would work better. So we decided on picking three easy songs for them to learn and began teaching them.

Half Term

25th February – Week at the School

This week we continued teaching them the three songs we chose before half term, but decided to get them all singing as this would be easier for them and would get them all involved. We also got the percussion and drum group to play the shakers on all of the songs as it helped keep everyone in time.

4th March – Planning Meeting

This week we planned out what everyone’s job role was going to be for the show and decided on what set up we were going to use e.g. where the children would stand and the audience would be and where we would stand.

11th March – Run Through

This week we had a full run through of the show so everyone knew what they were doing.

12th March – The Show

The show was a great success and everyone who came to watch really enjoyed the performance.