I am from the little province of Prince Edward Island in Canada. We celebrated Thanksgiving a month ago!!! But I thought I would share with my American Friends how our school prepares to celebrate our Thanksgiving Day Assembly.
Westwood Primary is a school of 600 K to grade 3 students. We have 2 music teachers. It’s amazing to have a teaching partner and I have the best – Ms. Dorothy Dahn. We offer an extra curricular opportunity for our students called Music Adventures. When we have an assembly to prepare for, we have an adventure with our students. We sing, play instruments, add drama and speaking parts as well as movement in preparation for performing for our school community. This year, our focus was gratitude.
This was our Master Plan:
Autumn Poem Soundscape
Sing a Rainbow
(We only taught them the chorus. For the verses we had the students create I am grateful for… statements. We played the music for the verses as they spoke and then repeated the chorus ABA form)
A Happy Place – Poem
I am Thankful
Another sweet little song we taught the whole school. We sang it all together accompanied by the piano. we did it 3 times: friends, family, me
The Grateful Book
We accompanied the story with a little Orff arrangement based on the melody of “I See the Moon”
Gratitude Video
We always include a video in our assemblies. This is the one we used this year.
Gratitude Stones – Poem
Gratitude Attitude
We taught this song to the whole school with movement. We had everyone stand up and sing with the video.
We always have a slide show to accompany our assemblies. This is the one we used for the Assembly.
So that is a peek into how we do things at Westwood. Every assembly has singing, poetry, instrumental accompaniments, a video, a slideshow and a book. It works well for us. I have left the PDF’s of the music on my PDF page of this blog.
Take care,
Syndi
