On Teaching

Last week, I found out that one of my former students in Massachusetts passed away suddenly.  Ironically (or perhaps not), I thought about Ed Sunday night and told Steve, "I should write him a note this week and see how he's doing."  Later, I found out that he died the next day.  Life is short, friends; too short to leave things unsaid, to worry about what others will think, to value things that don't matter.  Act now.  Love now.  Give now.  Focus on what matters. Ed was 73 years old when he began taking piano lessons from me in the summer of 2010.  I'll never forget that first week - he came in with a stack of big note, EZ-read piano books, a mini audio recorder, and an enormous amount of self determination.  We started at the beginning: landmark notes (Frances Clark method), folk songs, rote songs, and technic exercises.  Within the first year, he was sightreading simple songs, harmonizing folk melodies, and playing teacher-student duets in the studio's spring recital.  He was dedicated.

In our second year of study, he began learning key signatures and counting in unusual meters.  He performed solo in the studio recital earlier this year.  Our last lesson before I moved was at the end of July.  In those final weeks, Ed began asking questions about chords, harmonic progressions, and inversions.  He was curious and he truly loved learning.

Every week when he came into his lesson I would ask, "How are you doing today?"  His response always caught me off guard: "Oh, I'm much better, thank you."  "What do you mean 'much better'?"  I'd say.  "Were you sick?"  "No, I'm fine.  It's just that people always pay attention when you say 'I'm doing much better,'" he'd say with a grin.  I smile when I think of him looking down now, saying, "I'm doing much better, thank you."

What a privilege we have in teaching.

Teaching to me is not just about music or experiences.  It's about people - people like Ed who want to build on a lifelong love of music, people like Bobby who love to create, and people like Matthew who love to explore and build with musical patterns.  What an opportunity we have as teachers to engage with others, interact, and share musical experiences.  I am so grateful.

Happy birthday, darling

Happy birthday to this handsome fella today!  I so admire your patient and kind heart.  I am more and more grateful for you every day!  Thank you for being my husband and my best friend.  I love you!

Love, Speak, Give

The phrase, "Love, speak, give with intention" appears on my lock screen as a constant reminder to be more intentional about life.  It reminds me to do small deeds with great love, choose words carefully and intentionally, and give with joy.  This month, I've been intentional about gratitude and really acknowledging the good gifts we have been given.  As we celebrate Thanksgiving and families and football and turkey and cranberry sauce this weekend, I hope you sit a little longer, hug a little tighter, speak with intention, and give to others as much as you are able.  "Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices..."

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

Building a Successful Children's Choir Program

So, you want to start a children's choir. Awesome!

Wondering where to start and what to do first? 

Here are a few ideas and suggestions for getting started and building a new choir program, based on my experience starting and directing a children's choir program at a small church in rural Massachusetts.

*Disclosure: I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

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Building a Successful Children's Choir Program

Getting Started

The first step in building a new program is choosing a rehearsal time and setting age parameters. Will you rehearse during the week or on Sundays? Will you rehearse throughout the school year, or just for a season?

Consider the children you have in your congregation who may be interested in singing in choir. I started out with children in grades 1-6 so that we’d have a group of about 12. If you have enough interest, consider dividing the children into two age groups: K-2 and 3-6.

Once these pieces are in place, then you can start thinking about an overall theme for the year.

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Choosing a Theme

An overall theme can guide your planning, music selection, and activities, and foster engagement among those participating.

For the first year, I decided to build on an idea from a children's choir I had worked with in the past - "The Image of God." The visuals were things like film strips and photographs and each month, we explored a new way that we are made in God's image.

The second year, I planned an "Around the World" theme with music from various countries, flags, passports, and international prayers like Alan Paton’s “For Courage to Do Justice” (United Methodist Hymnal #456):

"Show me where love and hope and faith are needed,
and use me to bring them to those places. AMEN."

Once you have a theme, begin planning ways for the children to participate in worship throughout the year.

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Participating in Worship

One of the things that sets a church children’s choir apart from a school or community choir is the element of spiritual formation. Talk about the importance of sharing music in worship (read more here and here), the difference between worship and performance, and the impact of the message we have to share. Help the children to see that singing praises to God is a true privilege and that they are leaders when they participate in worship.

In addition to a few anthems throughout the year (including a few with the adult choir), you might plan and coordinate the music for the children's Christmas play as another opportunity for them to sing in worship.

Set goals for the program—both musical and spiritual—and begin searching for music.

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Choosing Repertoire

Pull from a variety of musical resources (especially those that are free!): hymnals (consider choosing a Hymn-of-the-Month, which maybe gets incorporated into worship on a day they sing), octavos already in your choral library (unison/2-part or SA), online resources, music you have at home, and a few new anthems that you find through Sheet Music Plus, J.W. Pepper, and Choristers Guild.

Related post: Top 50 Favorite Anthems for Children’s Choirs

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An invitational postcard for our "Around the World" choir year

Getting the Word Out

Next, promote your new program and invite children to participate. Write short announcements in the bulletin and newsletter, post information on the church website, post a flier at the library or gym, and pass out fliers at the beginning of the school year.

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Planning for Rehearsal

As you begin planning for the first rehearsals of the year, try to include several elements of discovery:

• uncover a new symbol somewhere in the room each month (a new picture on the film strip or a new flag)

• collect “stamps” from each country you visit in passports made with copy and construction paper

• fill out scripture cards (if the children look up the month's verse at home, copy it down and bring it back in, they get a piece of candy from the scripture jar—added incentive!)

Begin preparing your choir room or rehearsal space with other visuals like a "Thankful Tree" (the children in my choir loved this so much, we kept it around in the spring and turned it into a "Good Attendance Tree") and a world map where you can mark all the places you travel throughout the choir year.

For fun, pull together a few silly songs and musical games to use as change-of-pace activities: Ham and Eggs (traditional) and Irish circle/line dances when you "visit" Ireland around St. Patrick's Day. I love Madelyn Bridges' book, Sing Together, Children.

In a typical rehearsal, I started with a gathering activity or musical game. We did a few minutes of stretching and warm-ups before singing through the Hymn-of-the-Month. We read the scripture verse, reviewed the Symbol of the Month, and read the opening prayer together.

Next, I reviewed something familiar—a hymn or anthem. Then, we spent some time looking at a new anthem: learning the melody and text and discussing its meaning. By this point, the group was usually ready for a change of pace: a hand jive or clapping activity, a silly song, a musical game, or some rhythm improvisation. Generally, there was time left for one more song or anthem, one more change of pace activity, and our closing prayer.

Related resource: Free Children’s Choir Rehearsal Template

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Singing with Purpose

Consider tying in a mission element. For the "Around the World" theme, Operation Christmas Child was a perfect choice. This gave the children an opportunity to participate in something greater than our church and give to those in need. Together, we packed and shipped over two dozen shoe boxes to children around the world that year.

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Celebrating

How will you celebrate at the end of the choir year? Consider an ice cream party or game night or a special outing or field trip of some kind. 

Our end-of-year celebration for the "Around the World" year was a pizza party. Each family brought a different colored pizza topping and everyone helped make pizzas that looked like flags from around the world. We played a few traditional games from different countries, did a little trivia, and celebrated a year of exciting travel and music-making.

Related post: Four Ways to Celebrate the End of the Choir Year

End-of-the-Year "Around the World" Party Invitation

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Learn how to lead and teach your children’s choir, creatively and confidently.

Join me in Directing a Church Children’s Choir 101,
a 4-week online training program geared specifically toward children’s choir directors in church settings.

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I hope these ideas are helpful as you start your own children's choir program! Have other ideas or suggestions for working with children's choirs? Please share them in the comments!

Eastman Weekend

Last weekend was Eastman Weekend and with over 550 alumni in town there was much to celebrate!  Since it was Steve's and my first time attending alumni events as alumni (and not just students), we tried to take advantage of as much as we could.  Here's a glimpse of our first Eastman Weekend experience: On Friday night, we celebrated the 15th anniversary of Eastman's Arts Leadership Program (of which Steve and I are both alums), attended a welcome reception with the dean, and enjoyed a jazz concert in tribute to Rayburn Wright (who taught at Eastman from 1970-1990).  Many of his students returned to play on the concert so there were many wonderful guest artists.  We may have snuck out for pizza at intermission - it was a long day!

On Saturday morning, we were interviewed as alumni to discuss the role the Arts Leadership Program has played in our careers and then we scrambled to get to the market, do our shopping, grab lunch, and be back at school by 1 p.m.  In the afternoon, we attended an awesome workshop with Fifth House Ensemble out of Chicago (the Executive Director and her husband are both Eastman alums!).  They talked about innovative programming, interdisciplinary performance, and the nuts and bolts of building a business and gave us lots of good things to think about.

Later in the evening, we attended the opening concert of the Prismatic Debussy Festival.  This month, we're celebrating what would have been Debussy's 150th birthday and Eastman has put together a month-long festival of scholarship, concerts, and visual presentations to celebrate the occasion.  It was so exciting to witness the first concert!  Many of Eastman's large ensembles performed and Eastman's graduate dean shared insightful narration and video projections throughout the program.  It was a wonderful concert!

If you're in the area and would like to attend some of the Prismatic Debussy events this month, see the schedule here.

Do What Matters

Do what matters.

This is my new motto.

When you really stop to think about what matters in life, the world seems to stop spinning quite so fast.  There are so many things in life that vie for my attention every day - emails, bills, people asking me to do more, my iPhone in general, you get the idea.  But do they really matter in the bigger picture?  Not so much.

Sometimes things happen that put things back in perspective.  You make choices about what you are going to do and what you are going to leave undone. 

Sound familiar? 

This happened to me last week.  The decision seems easy at the time but it makes you stop and think.  How often would I make this same choice on a normal day?  How often do I scroll through Instagram during our after dinner conversations?  As recently as last night, I'm embarrassed to say.  How often do I fret about meeting the expectations of others or getting everything done in a day?

This is a reminder to myself: Do what matters. (Forget the rest.)

Happy anniversary, darling

Happy anniversary, darling.

What an exciting year we've had!  We moved to a new state, visited eight states together + two more on our own, and hit 100,000 miles in the car.  We started (and stopped and started) jogging and started eating healthier.  I became a coffee drinker, you became a Bachelor Pad fan (I take full responsibility).  You had four commissions(!), I started a new degree program, and between us, we had two failed publishing attempts (there's always next year!).  We tried too many new recipes to count, saw Vermont in the fall, made our first trip to the ER, played concerts for audiences ages 2-80+, found our new everyday wine, and became Apple converts.

Our first year as husband and wife was not without its challenges but we had many laughs along the way.  I'm so grateful for your kind heart, your patient spirit, and your unwavering support.  My heart is full of so many sweet memories!  Remember splashing in the puddles on Main Street on our way to the Post Office?  And rearranging the tulips on Easter Sunday morning?  How about that time I opened a fortune cookie that had nothing inside and you opened yours to find two?  I learned just how handsome you look in a bow tie and you learned that my southern charm has a fiery side (or maybe you already had that one figured out).

I'm so grateful for the life we share together.  I love you!

P.S.  See more of our wedding pictures here and here.

Life is Good

Oh my goodness, what happened to September?!  Suddenly, it's cold enough to need scarves and sweaters (and salted caramel mochas) and it's dark by the time we sit down to dinner in the evenings.  Yes, the weeks are flying by but every day is so fulfilling.  I absolutely love the work I am doing!  Life is full, life is busy, and life is very rewarding.

Life is good, y'all.

I used to be afraid of change.  In some ways, I still am - it's different, uncomfortable, and unfamiliar.  But you know what I'm learning?  Despite all this, change can be a good thing.  Really good.  The past few months have been full of change for us but it's good change.  It's a growing kind of change.  I jumped back into the life of a full-time student (which I love), Steve recreated his daily routine, we've been humbled by God's goodness to us (more than we could have asked for), we found a new church home (and joined the choir!), we defined our new "normal."  There have been a few challenging moments for sure but when I consider the number of wonderful, new opportunities we've both had of late, I find I can be nothing but grateful for all this change.

Every day is a chance to make things happen, learn something new, or teach something.  I came across an awesome quote in my reading this week: "Doing creates knowing" (Patricia Miller).  This holds so much truth in so many areas of my life right now.  Go and do this week.  Don't just think about it or talk about it or wish about it.  Go and love.  Go and teach.  Go and give back.  Go and live life to its fullest.  Go and make it happen!

xo, Ashley

P.S. Next month, we'll be celebrating our first anniversary!  Can you believe it?  What an adventure this year has been!  So grateful.

Cultivating Creativity

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."

What a great quote by Sir Ken Robinson.

Confession: Sometimes, I get caught up watching TED Talks.  They're just so engaging and each presenter has something unique to say.  Topics are often very different but the commonality is found in the discussion of innovation, education, technology, and creativity.  In this talk, Sir Ken Robinson talks about the creativity of young children and how our educational system counteracts it (i.e. kills it) in favor of more important subject matter (math and science).  He offers three useful points when describing intelligence:

1. Intelligence is diverse. We think visually, in sound, and kinesthetically; we think in abstract, we think through movement.

2. Intelligence is dynamic. The brain is interactive.  Creativity often comes about through different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

3. Intelligence is distinct. How did you discover your talent?

How can we cultivate creativity in our teaching?

New Student Orientation

Last week was New Student Orientation at Eastman.  It feels a little surreal - I am so, so grateful to be back.

Orientation Week generally includes advising sessions, placement exams, meet-and-greet events, tours, and a few special events for all the new students.  For me, the week looked like this:

• Day 1: a meeting with my advisor to discuss course options, an appointment to get my new ID card, and an info fair on local organizations
• Day 2: breakfast with the deans and a TA meeting
• Days 3 and 4: placement exams (and three more meetings)
• Day 5: registration day

Amidst the flurry of excitement, there were a few stressful moments.  First, those dreaded placement exams. 

A little back story: I've been studying Renaissance music history (in great detail) and counterpoint (Renaissance through Early Classical) for a month now.  (You see, when I started my masters at Eastman a few years ago, I passed both the music history and the theory placement exams.  Now, as a returning student, I was only required to take certain portions of each test.)  I was ready for the tests but it's still a lot of pressure.  If you don't pass these tests, you're required to take extra (remedial) courses before graduating.  Not only does that add hours to your schedule but it also costs more than a pretty penny. 

Anyway, I walked into the history exam on Wednesday and got a copy of the test.  Because I had taken it before, they included a copy of my previous scores in the packet but I realized right away I was looking at someone else's scores.  Come to find out (after taking the test anyway), I passed everything the first time and didn't need to take this test at all.  They had the wrong placement exam on file the whole time.  Seriously.

Naturally, I treated myself to a lemon cookie from my favorite bakery on the way home.

The second most stressful part of the week - course scheduling.  I walked into my first advising meeting of the week bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with a 3-page list of courses I wanted to take with credits, days/times, and teachers already written out.  Yes, I'm that girl.  The problem was not my level of preparedness; the problem was that most of the courses on my list were already full.

I won't tell you how many times I rewrote my schedule in five days.

By Thursday, I finally had four classes that were still open and did not conflict with my TA schedule and I had approval from the dean to add an additional credit to this semester.  Then, I went to register.  One of the courses I had chosen was only open to theory majors and another course had waaaay too many projects and assignments.

After a small meltdown, Steve and I looked through the list one more time and found a course that was still open.  Thank goodness.  In the end, it's an eclectic mix: theories of human development, sacred music, studio teaching, and 19th century music history.  It's a perfect sampler of everything I am hoping to incorporate into my program of study.

Year 1 starts today!