The past two days I have been doing virtual workshops for a Halton Public school. It was a lot of fun and the kids were so full of energy and very respectful of the obvious difficulties I would have wrangling a class from the computer screen. I was able to work with some primary grades as well, which presented a bit of a challenge. This past year has presented many firsts for CRASH and many opportunities to think outside of the box. I had never worked with primary grades, online, from their classroom before. I had done some during lockdown where each of the kids were at their own homes. These workshops were easy to figure out as the kids had everything in their homes at their disposal to make music. But these students in class had nothing but their desks.
Therefore I was able to put something into practice that I had been thinking about for a long time, Desk Percussion! We were able to create different sounds just using our desks. We learned some fundamentals and wrote songs. All in all it kept very much in CRASH’s mantra of ‘making music with anything’. It was an absolute blast and I hope to get many more primary grades on board with this new way of making music together!
Hilary