Year 13: Week 17 - Return Of The Winter Programs - Part 1

"You must have been waiting for years to do this. You were having so much fun!" 

"Thanks, and yes, I have been waiting a long time for this."

The last time we had a JK-5 Winter Program was in 2019. Three years later, this event was finally back. Every time this program was put on before 2019, it was a great achievement by the students and the music faculty. This program is the only time all of the students in JK-5 share a program with their families in the audience. Every single student in seven grade go on up on stage and performs. The students worked on the music for weeks and also worked on the performance skills of walking on and off stage and how to stand and perform for an audience.

The music is all memorized; instruments and choreography are often involved in these performances, and for many students, this is one of the few times they are up on stage performing in the school year.

For the music faculty, a lot of work goes into this program. A lot of time is spent on the selection of music. It's important to find a piece at the pedagogical level for the students and meaningful music reflecting diverse cultures and shared values. Focused on the student's experience, teachers carefully plan everything from seating charts to lighting.

These challenges and hard work were present in "normal years." This year was anything but normal.

For the 2022 winter program, we knew we were dealing with a unique situation. Instead of having one grade, the JK students who had never experienced this MX had three grades: JK, SK, and 1st. In addition, the older grade students only have vague memories of their performance in 2019, when they were younger.

Our students had three years of the modified curriculum because of the pandemic. Students were remote in the last part of the 2019-2020 school year. During the 2020-2021 school year, COVID-19 mitigations meant we couldn't have our students sing. Then in the 2021-2022 school year, we had to modify everything we taught considering our students' experience since the pandemic started.

We needed to consider who the students were as musicians affected by our curriculum changes throughout the pandemic. More importantly, we needed to examine who our students were as learners and human beings. The younger students lived most of their with the COVID-19 pandemic, and older students only have vague memories of a time before masks and social distancing.

We had students who needed to learn what this program meant and missed out on meaningful learning that would have helped them during this performance. We had to completely rethink who our students were as learners and people compared to pre-pandemic years, and we, as faculty, had yet to do this performance in three years.

This all would have been enough to make this performance an enormous challenge. 

All of this made the success and joy of the JK-5 Winter Program even more extraordinary.