Thursday, February 2, 2012

January 2012 - Week 4 - Choose the Right "play" and holding up CTR shields

The sharing time lesson was a singing lesson where the teacher taught a brief concept, then we sang a song about the concept, starting with our Heavenly Father's plan to send us to earth so that we could have mortal bodies, and ending with how we can return to him by making good choices.

Therefore, it made sense to combine singing time and sharing time. I didn't want the children to be totally restless by the time the teacher taught the lesson. I could just hear them sighing, "mooooree singing?" Generally, the children like singing time when I do it right ... just not necessarily for 45 minutes.

Our sharing time teacher for the day (KS) had the great idea of presenting that we were in a big production and that they were the cast members. She then framed up each song before having us sing a different song.

To keep things interesting, I had us sing the songs in different fun ways. One of the songs was one the children don't know as well, and that I knew we wouldn't have time to teach. For senior primary, wrote it onto sheets of paper, using different ink colors to indicate if all, boys, or girls should be singing. This was an idea I found on another singing blog, and it worked GREAT. I was careful about how I divided up the singing, and it ended up sounding very pretty and very deliberate. I would like to do this at the end of the year during our primary singing program, if I can do it well. We'll see - I don't want to be too ambitious but I would love to enhance the experience if I can do it within reason and well.

I also had them sing a song with crescendo and decrescendo, and other fun things.

For senior primary, I also incorporated some ideas from my favorite singing blog, the Crazy Chorister, where I had them build a shield. I partially did this because I knew we'd end up having more time in senior primary so I wanted to draw it out a bit. However, it also helps to keep the children focused. We also had to cut songs out for junior primary because we ran out of time.

Oh, we didn't quite finish our game from the previous week in time in junior primary, so first, I had them finish playing the game from the week before.

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