Monday 8th August
The recurring theme of our office days on a Monday has been web-design/branding. Our task for the half-day was to research and report back on web-designer companies, providing feedback on which we liked and which we didn’t and more importantly why we thought certain web-designers suited us more than others. Not much more to report on that really!
Tuesday 9th August
A couple of months ago I had a conversation with a friend; Amy Briggs who mentioned she worked for an organisation called ‘Action for Young Carers’, we chatted about working with young people and our experiences in this field and sowed the seeds for some cross-organisational work. After many emails and phone calls everything had come to fruition and we were booked for four sessions at the A4YC respite residential stays at Skegness Grammar School in Wainfleet (Lincolnshire).
Today’s session consisted of an hour’s workshop with 21 children from the age range of 7 – 11 years. With it being such a nice we decided to lead the session outdoors in the grounds…big mistake! Although the idea of doing a workshop outside seemed perfectly pleasant the reality was not for a number of reasons.
a) The wind carried our voices making it very hard to be heard clearly.
b) It was hard to keep the children in a tight group.
c) Many distractions…in particular Ladybirds!
d) The lack of a room and therefore a resonant chamber of sorts meant the quieter instruments were completely lost against the sound of the louder instruments.
As well as being our first session outdoors this was one of the largest groups we’ve lead and this posed a slight amount of intimidation but we worked our best to keep control of the situation. This session also highlighted the need to spend more time on individual exercises and staying on something until the desired result is achieved, it’s this element of time management that does however become second nature over time. Apart from these somewhat negative aspects of the workshops we achieved our main goal in that the children thoroughly enjoyed themselves, as did we.
Wednesday 10th August
We’ve been trying our best to be D.I.Y. gurus over the past two weeks (with some success!), the building session in Binbrook was a success but as mentioned we were having issues with the resonance and volume of the instrument. After looking over the tubing we came to the conclusion that we needed to add more sound holes, so whilst Pete set to work with the power drill I re-glued and re-tightened the frame. The second phase of ‘project xylophone’ was to paint the frame and tubing, in prep for that me and Pete went to acquire some good quality acrylic paints and paint brushes in town. Back at the workshop Pete and I prepped the frame and piping for painting and finished in good time to have a short break before heading to Binbrook.
The painting and music activities running side by side at the activity night proved to be a big success, as you’d expect the boys seeing painting as “too girly” for them to do, so they instead made music with Pete on the junk instruments and provided more than couple of frights via the medium of stray shots from their indoor cricket match! The painting was messy, but hey! What is fun if it’s all clean? The girls did a magnificent job of illuminating the xylophone and got on the task needing only the occasional menial assistance from myself…good to know I’m useful for something haha. It was hard to ignore the sound coming from the music session being led by Pete; the children playing some of the most complex rhythms I’ve heard them play so far, there was also a great flow to Pete’s workshop, bringing in new elements with each exercises and developing in a logical way. Next week we’re going to be doing much the same, although hopefully there’ll be less cleaning up to do afterwards.
Thursday 11th
Another trip across The Fens meant only one thing today, our second workshop at Wainfleet for ‘Action For Young Carers’. With our lesson learnt from our first session we decided to hold our session today indoors. It’s often easy to dwell on the negative aspects of previous experience and admittedly the wayward nature of our last session did rest on the back of our minds, but we were determined to do only what one can do and not make the same mistakes again. The positive attitude paid off for us and the session ran smoothly (almost), the usual folly occurred; children playing instruments when asked not to, volume that Bonham would have been proud of and general interest in playing anything other than the pattern taught (creativity is always promising to see though).
The group were smaller in number this time round by four, but this made the world of difference in terms of keeping ‘law & order’ and in comparison this group were much more focused and of a higher ability. It’s the variation in abilities and behaviour of groups of the same age that keep the job interesting as it forces us to think on the fly and gives us something to react with; something we encounter all the time as musicians, especially in creative sessions. As ever we had fun and the exercises ran smoothly for the most part, after an hour or so we could that group was waning in energy so we wrapped things up by getting each person to do a small solo and then ended with a big crescendo of noise…very avant garde.
The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX
01522 811229
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