"Keep Calm and Sing On" was the slogan my students selected for our choir t-shirts at the beginning of the 2012-13 school year. Little did we know that this would prove difficult but necessary after May 20, 2013! On that day, our choir room was in the path of an F-5 tornado and was destroyed.
Our students come from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds; we have a number of students from military families as a major Air Force base is only 15 minutes from our school.
We also have a number of students who are in foster families and as you can imagine, those students need a lot of love and support.
My Project
With our classroom gone and the rebuilding project projected to take at least 12-14 months, we are adjusting to working in a much smaller location within the main school. Losing the Zoom recorder was really tough as it is basically a mini-recording studio/mixing lab! We were able to record performances, record accompaniments for students to practice with, load and transfer those files onto a computer or their own device; it was a huge help for home practice! And the keyboard will allow us to split the class for work on individual sections.
Our old room had a separate practice room, but our new temporary location has a location that would allow us to work under a shelter in front of the school as long as we have something portable to use. So both of these items would be a huge help to our classroom and allow us to rehearse the choirs as we had become accustomed to doing.
While a Junior High choir is not the same as a select High School ensemble, our goal is to prepare them for that experience.
Both of these items we are requesting will help us in rehearsing our choirs, provide them accompaniment material for home practice and assist us in setting up a working music classroom in our temporary location. Thank you so much for the opportunity to get the word out and put our classroom back together!
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