I must be crazy

No, seriously. I must be.

In Week 10 of this term (we're currently at the end of Week 7), there are two important events for our class. One is our class assembly, for which we have to present an item; and the other is a regional music festival involving at least half a dozen schools.

For the music festival, I decided to avoid going the "just another song from the Sing! books" route and instead decided to teach my class of 10-12 year olds to play the recorder and do a recorder orchestra performance. Most of these kids have never even picked up a recorder before! But I chose a slow, fairly simple song (title and lyrics here), and arranged it for voice (2 kids), descant recorder (3), alto recorder (2), tenor recorder (2), guitar (2), xylophone (1), tambour (1), triangle (1) and tapping sticks (1). And I'm teaching them to play it, slowly but surely. It's starting to come together, too - they're still a bit squeaky and hesitant, but they are getting there and I think it's actually going to work. But what a project to be working on during report time!

The kids were asking me about assembly just before lunch today, and I told them honestly that I had no idea what we were doing, yet. We've been studying the book "The Secret Garden" in class, and one of the kids piped up with the suggestion that we do a short play version of "The Secret Garden". This was immediately leapt upon by the rest of the class as an awesome idea, so by 4pm this afternoon I'd written a vastly abbreviated play version of the novel. It relies heavily on narration but it has enough speaking parts for all of the students, captures the essence of the novel, and is short enough to do at assembly. And we're going to do it in full costume. The school has this shed full of accumulated costumes and there's some stuff in there that is just perfect. I'm going to dress them all up as people from the 1890s and they can't even complain about it. Heehee.

These two events are two days apart in just under three weeks' time. And reports are due just over a week from now. I must be INSANE.

But I'm having so much fun!