Sing Up update

News from around the country

JOIN THE DEBATE ON QUALITY

Do you believe clarity is the key to good vocal leadership? Perhaps an encouraging and positive approach is the best way to spark singing creativity? Want your say? Then the Sing Up Quality Blog is for you!

Launched alongside the free Quality poster in issue 7, the blog is online and the debate is ever growing. To get everyone’s thoughts flowing, we’ve created a simple user poll. Visitors can also respond to the content and the thoughts of others.

Don’t delay – give us your opinion today by visiting the blog.

VOCAL FORCE NEWS

VF South Normanton (Derbyshire): This project is bringing together primary teachers, Healthy Schools staff, children’s librarians and community musicians. At their last twilight training session, they looked at creating tongue twisters with a Christmassy theme, which proved very effective and brought the participants together, sharing good singing within the group and ideas at the end. Their activity featured in our special festive pack.

VF Bury: After a celebratory concert that staff had been working towards in October, one parent stopped the facilitator to thank Sing Up for “changing her daughter’s life”. Her daughter had been a shy and withdrawn little soul, but is now confident to sing and perform in public!

VF Brighton: This project, run by Rhythmix, has just started and is focusing on working with health care and social work professionals in a variety of different sessions and activities. The session had some great feedback about how their daily practice would change because of the course. “[It] gave some perspective on the importance of some alternative methods to communicate with children”, “I’m now more open to the value of music in allowing children to express feelings” and “I’m more aware of young people’s interest in music and am willing to make a fool of myself!”

Our new commission by David and Carrie Grant

National Sing Up Day will be your first chance to hear our new song commission, Raise my voice. Written by celebrity vocal coaches David and Carrie Grant alongside four accompanying warm-ups, this special project will form a resource pack supporting the Healthy Schools initiative. Look for it later this year.

Joining forces

British Forces schools can now enjoy Sing Up wherever they are in the world! Nand Cassily of Episkopi Primary School in Cyprus has registered and is already excited. “The site is fabulous! I’ve got my password and am looking forward to using the songs in my drama lessons!”

To register, teachers should click on the Register tab on our home page and select ‘England’ as country and ‘teacher’ as role.

Community spirit

After a Sing Up twilight in Dorset for all of the Purbeck schools, one group was so enthused that it now wishes to start a community cohesion project, bringing together their communities and schools for regular workshops. This was because they so enjoyed singing together as adults!

Sing Up’s Children in Need TV debut

One of our Area Leaders, Portsmouth Music Service, has had tremendous success with a song composed for BBC Children in Need. The song has been made available to download, with Hampshire getting involved too. The song, written by Simon Roberts, stars young singing leader Courtney as the soloist, and she sang live as part of the BBC’s coverage of Children in Need on 20 November 2009 at Beaulieu. The song, Song for Children in Need, is available in the Song Bank.