In this post I will discuss the past two rehearsals with the students of Hardin Baptist Church. However, I will mainly focus on the most recent rehearsal, which occured on November 6, 2011.
For the rehearsal on October 30th, I aided another instructor in leading the music rehearsal for the 1st - 5th grade students for about 45 minutes. Together, the other instructor and I taught the students two new songs and reviewed the songs that they already know. I noticed that the students are becoming more and more excited with each rehearsal and are singing every song with increasing confidence. I really enjoy seeing the progress the students are making with this show.
During the second half of rehearsal, I took the students who have lines and led them in a rehearsal of scenes 1-3. Some of the students were having problems with the dialogue. They had most of their lines memorized, but they hadn't memorized their entrances, so I had to feed them the beginning of their lines. We stopped and started several times, but by the end of rehearsal each of the students had progressed significantly in their understanding of where their lines fit into the story.
In the most recent rehearsal on November 6th, I was the only music director present and I led the full music rehearsal for all age groups. We mainly focused on the memorization of all the songs the students have learned so far, so I only allowed them to look at their papers if they absolutely had to. We sang the songs with the CD (with voices) first, and after a run-through we sang the songs again with the CD that had the music only. The students were doing well with memorization, but for the first part of rehearsal I seemed to be the only one that was energized and excited about it. The students seemed timid and distracted, so instead of just asking them to sing louder (in which case the response has always been shouting) I challenged each of the students to sing louder than I was without shouting. Some of them told me that they would not be able to sing louder than me, but I reassured them that surely if they all sang together they could "beat" me. It became a fun little game. Each time the students would become unsure of themselves and sing so softly they could not be heard, I would challenge them again to best me, and each time the students began singing with more confidence, as they were more focused on the game than on their insecurities with the song. I thought the rehearsal overall was a success, and I may be using this idea in the future.
Below is a link to a study by Loyola University on children's memory and their varied abilities to remember information and events.
http://www.luc.edu/childrensmemory/skilled_remembering.shtml
