Sixth Week

Hi!

Due to an outbreak of chickenpox, it was a quiet week at the Kindergarten in Srebrenica this week, with only three children in the workshop. Nevertheless, Toni led a fun-packed 45minutes beginning with our weekly ‘Dobar dan’ (good day) song and followed by lots of short musical games and activities encouraging the children to sing, feel a pulse, and practise their motor skills.

Dobar dan, Dobar dan,
Dobro došli,
Mi pjevamo i sviramo,
Sad zajedno svi.

[Good day, good day,


Welcome everyone,
We sing and we play,
Altogether now.]

It was lovely to see familiar faces again at the Potočari workshop this week: the children now know a large repertoire of songs and in future sessions we can now plan to build on some of the composition work from previous workshops. We began this week’s session with some physical and vocal warm-ups. Toni led a warm-up which involved a call-and-response chant that was then repeated in different voices (loud, soft, singing etc). It was particularly interesting to see the children singing quietly during this warm-up and I think we will push them to sing with different dynamics in future sessions.

During the rest of the session, favourite songs such as Abutange Vu and Tingaleo were interspersed with focus activities and we also taught them a new song called Tekele Lomeria, which contains extremes of dynamics as the singing gets quieter and quieter before suddenly shouting at the end.

Tekele lomeria a in gayeya,
Tekele lomeria a in gayeya,
Aa, aa, in gayeya,
Mm, mm, in gayeya,
HA!!

The music section, under Toni’s guidance, continued to work on the music for the monster scene. This week the children thought about how they wanted to end the piece, and decided that the Dundun should stop, leaving only the djembe and darbuka, and then all rhythms should slowly fade out. We were also able to talk with Jana who leads the dance section and we have organised to combine the music and dance section rehearsal next week which will be very useful.

Unfortunately the majority of the children who attend the workshops in Skelani were watching their friends in a football match this week and so numbers were depleted (only three children). I hope that this was just a one-off occurrence and that next week things will be back to normal. We had planned to spend the session composing with the children, writing the song that the pirates will sing in the show. However, one of the girls had brought with her the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face and so an impromptu session was spent arranging this popular hit for percussion, guitar and keyboard.

A few weeks ago, I went with Toni to his nephew’s kindergarten in Sarajevo (Sv Obitelj) and we led a music workshop with the kids there. The session lasted an hour and a half and about 60 children attended! We played lots of musical games and sang lots of songs with the children who were very enthusiastic and remained energetic and engaged throughout the long session. We were even able to do a small composing activity with them where the children drew shapes on a large piece of paper, coloured them in and then used this as a graphical score to conduct the rest of the group. It was a great experience for me to work with such a large number of children and I hope to return with Toni to the kindergarten in the following weeks.