We had a fantastic Community Day at Youth Stringband this week! The weather was incredible, and we enjoyed art and enrichment time inside, and music and games outside.
Our advanced students joined everyone else at the EcoVillage for an afternoon of community building fun. The day started with all students learning about the late legend and local songwriter Randall Hylton. Students were then divided into two large groups based on their age, and rotated between two main activities. The first activity centered around principles of songwriting, and included the option to write a song (with teachers Jamie Collins and Ipi Hello), learning more about Randall Hylton (with teachers George Slusher and Jesse Smathers), or enjoying song writing “Mad Libs” style (with teachers Jared Boyd, Gina Dilg, and our admin Leigh McKagen). Try singing “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss” with a whole lot of funny adjectives and nouns! Check out a sample Mad Lib activity below – what kind of song will you write?
For our second activity, students continued working on their crankie box project for the song “Groundhog” while other students jammed to this song – and many others! “Groundhog” has fantastic lyrics, and students worked in pairs to illustrate lines like “Old Aunt Sal was the mother of them all, / She fed them on ground hog before they could crawl.” We’ll spend more time on this activity during our next Community Day, and we can’t wait to share this fantastic project with the entire community!
We finished the day with a bit of time spent outside in the warm sunshine with a water balloon toss race, and although no one ended up wet, we had a blast! We’re back to our instrument instruction based classes for the next few weeks, but we look forward to another round of community building in April.
