There are several ways that Boonah State School caters to its students and challenges them in their musical experiences.
High achieving students are identified and offered a place in the Instrumental Program. Students are able to specialise learning an instrument such as the trumpet, flute, saxophone, trombone or drums in small group lessons, we have Mr Simon Francis teaching Instrumental small group lessons and running our before school Thursday band rehearsal at 8am.
Keen singers in year 3-6 have an opportunity to join our Boonah State School Choir, which this year is rehearsing before school on Tuesday mornings. We start with fun games and You Tube clips for the students who arrive on time (8am-8:15am); then we work on more complicated new music working on memorising words and improving singing technique and at present learning to read complicated scores for our Singfest 2016 massed choir workshop/Excursion and we finish with the last 10 minutes at 8:30am with running through a few songs like a performance. So far this year our choir has performed at Anzac Day, the Boonah Show and Seniors Week: Boonah to Broadway. We are attending SingFest again this year and have a few other performances this year.
All students are expected to attend and participate in a weekly class music lesson with Miss Suzanne Bauer our music classroom specialist of 30 mins each week. Miss Bauer teaches some singing, listening, movement, responding to music and creating music patterns of our own. We play percussion, simple ukulele songs,
learn to read treble clef music and play basic recorder songs, and in term three we spend some time playing with xylophones and glockenspiels. We sing songs from many different genres, styles and countries and sing some songs that link with units of work in their regular classroom.
Classroom Music at Boonah SS teaches the essential skills in the new ACARA national music curriculum through a practical program involving: singing, percussion, ukulele’s and recorders. In music lessons students will learn common musical concepts and terms and develop music creating and performing skills.