Spring Concert- Thwacked!

While most of you music bloggers are blogging about finishing up school, we just finished our grade 4-6 Spring Concert!

Here are some highlights, as well as some homemade costume ideas that you might like!

Grade 6 Orff Club performed #9 from the Orff Schulwerk, volume IV, as well as an arrangement of Some Nights!

Next up was our guitar club, who performed "I Will Wait" by Mumford and Sons!

Up third was our grade 4/5 Orff club who performed an arrangement of I Knew You Were Trouble and an Eric Corbiere piece entitled "Hidden Path".

Here our recorder players are doing a movement section for "Hidden Path".

And on to the musical! This year we did Thwacked! By Dave and Jean Perry, published by Shawnee Press. The kids loved it! Click HERE to view the musical score and have a listen to their tracks!

We had a couple of ideas of our own, including two acting trees! Click HERE to see my process for creating the tree costumes!

We had beautiful renaissance costumes made by a volunteer years ago and I thought they would be perfect for the narrators to wear for this fairy tale! 

A staff member's daughter did amazing job creating the story book. It's two ornately painted extra-large pizza boxes! The book even opens up!

The story is based on a frog prince who thinks the sky is falling. I love the way the frog costumes turned out! 

 Stay tuned later on this week for the costume tutorial, including those cute hats!

We also added Chicken Little to the mix, along with her two "Mean Girls" inspired BFFs: Henny Penny and Ducky Daddles. Those hats were all white and were only $2.00 from Dollarama. I painted each one to match each character's outfit! The skirts with feather detailing turned out so well too! 

I like adding elements to our musicals that the kids come up with. The girls came up with the idea of having Adele's "Skyfall" somewhere in the plot! Perfect! Ducky says, "Don't worry my BFF, I will save you if the sky falls!" and she dances to the song to try and impress her hard-to-impress friends. Here she is: 

What a great time we had! It was a lot of work but it all paid off! And it really helped this year with having a student teacher during musical time. The kids did a fabulous job!

"Stay Tuned" for more costume and set ideas... and tutorials!

- Steph

Tree Costumes for Our Musical!

Spring concert is coming up! I have a pair of tree characters in our musical this year. I started pinning ideas for tree costumes. Here are some projects that inspired me to get started!

I found this cute costume idea HERE.

 These little girls look so cute in the costumes found HERE.

Made by GC featured a homemade tree costume found HERE.

They are all super cute, except my costumes need to be suitable and fit 12 year old boys!

I found $10 hoodies at the good old Canadian store Giant Tiger and got started! I also found brown dress/canvas pants from Value Village.

I painted some black lines to make the tree trunk. I did the same on the pants.  

Next, dark green and lime green leaves were cut from felt. We glued lime green veins onto some of the dark ones to add texture. 

Ta da! Here I am in one of our tree hoodies!

- Steph

Light It Up!

The grade 1 to 3 students performed "Twinkle and Shine" by John Jacobson and John Higgins for our Holiday Concert in December. I was excited to use some kind of extra light during the concert, especially for the ballad "The Light at the Top". 

I found these cool finger lights at Dollarama! They were only a dollar for a pack of four! 

Each student had a light on their finger for the song. The kids loved doing the choreography with light on the end of their fingers!

We loved it! The kids received so many compliments from the community too! This piece was by far the favourite of the evening!

- Steph

Holiday Concert Costumes!

Holiday concert is over and vacation has begun! I thought I'd post a couple costumes from the concert.

This year my grade 1 to 3 students performed the new Hal Leonard musical "Twinkle and Shine" by John Jacobson and John Higgins. I loved it, the kids loved it and I heard a lot of great feedback from the families and our staff.

I left most of my pictures at school so I will show more costumes later... but in the meantime, here are two of the bird costumes that a parent volunteer made.

Besides for forest birds, the musical also included pine trees!

I made these with the help of some amazing educational assistants and teachers! I found a couple Youtube tutorials from Expert Village to make the NO SEW ponchos! Link on the videos below for the tutorials. I measured my ponchos to be 1metre x 1metre. They are soooo easy!

No-Sew Fleece Ponchos: Supplies for Making a Child's Poncho

No-Fleece Ponchos: Trimming the Edges

No-Fleece Ponchos: Cutting the Neck Hole for a Child's Poncho

The hats were a bit trickier. Initially we took poster board and made a tall cone by stapling and taping it together. We covered the cone with left over fleece from the poncho. You can see in the picture that the cone rests right on the top of the child's head. We found out at our dress rehearsal though, the hats kept sliding all over the kids' heads because the hats were so tall and heavy.

Our solution was... to make shorter cones that fit into the very top of the tree hat, but kept the fleece the same length. That way it fit more like a toque (winter hat for my American readers!) and the fleece fit nice and snug, keeping it on their heads. With less poster board, there was also less weight. We added fleece ties with a glue gun, to keep the hats from falling off. These hats worked out! And these trees looked precious!

Sorry for the "children of the corn" spooky students pics! I can't figure out how to black out spots using iPhoto! Any suggestions?

Tell me about your costumes! I love new ideas!

- Steph