Fourth Week

The kindergarten workshop closely followed last week's format, which Toni (who leads this workshop) and ourselves felt worked very well. So we sang, danced and played lots of musical games throughout an energetic 45 minutes.

Something that has been slightly problematic thus far in our Potočari sessions is that each week we are not sure which children to expect. There are new kids (of varying ages) every session, and there seems never to be any teachers in the school building. This week in particular there were several older kids, and many of the keen younger ones were not there. We had planned further song-writing and percussion activities, building on the work started last week, but this did not go to plan. We tried, instead, to do whole group percussion work, but many of the new, older kids were quite uninterested and dismissive, to the point that many of them left early (much to our dismay). This was quite off-putting for the younger members of the group (who have attended previous sessions). We suspect that many of these older kids were not who the school had intended to take part in the workshops, but rather they just happened to outside the school when we arrived. As there were no teachers around, we weren't able to discuss this with them, but we hope that Amir may be able to contact the school on our behalf regarding this.

Later that day we had a successful music theatre rehearsal. Toni, who is in charge of the music section for the Christmas show, decided that, despite there being only two boys who have ever attended a rehearsal, this week we should go full steam ahead and start putting together the music for the show. It proved to be a very fruitful workshop, with the two boys directing the ensemble (me on keyboard and everyone else on drums) as they built up music to accompany a scene featuring a terrifying sea-monster! Their drumming skills also continue to improve, as Toni is very thorough in his teaching.

On Thursday in Skelani we continued with our hand percussion work - putting some rhythms together with a fun Brazilian song about a seahorse (or morski konj in Bosnian).

Daleko na moru
Valovi igrau
Morski konj pliva
Traži gdje je riva
Morski konj je zgodan
Morski konj je miran
Morski konj je divan
To je morski konj!


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The beast song from Potočari.