Space Program Ideas

I work in an urban magnet school that has a science emphasis. For the 2000-01 school year, our main focus was on space. We explored the solar system, stars, methods of travel in space, books about space (fiction/non-fiction) and career exploration (not just astronauts, but all related aerospace areas). Our winter concert had songs that mentioned outer space in one way or another. For our youngest students, we sang: Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star; Aiken Drum (we created new verses - one of the teaching assistants made us a large figure with detachable body parts that we added to the figure as we sang the song) Big Beautiful Planet by Raffi, Mr. Sun (Share the Music - K). Our primary team (grades 1-2-3) did recorder piece from Music K-8, Vol. 10, No. 4 entitled "Saturday Night Star". It's a "disco" version of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." I borrowed sets of individual tone bells and we played it like a bell choir. Most students received one bell to play, but more advanced students were selected to play the entire song on Orff instruments and assorted melodic percussion. You probably could do this piece with Boomwhackers®, too. This group also performed "Dancin' in the Moonlight," Music K-8, Vol. 10, No. 4. We made simple props with stars mounted on paper plates to use for simple hand/arm movements during the rather lengthy interlude. We sang the song "Mission Control",which is in the grade 2 - Silver Burdett series.

For our final assembly program, we did a 2001 version of Mozart's Magic Flute with a professional opera company from Madison, WI called Opera for the Young. We had a chorus of 20 students perform with the opera company, everyone in the school learned some of the music and we all dressed up like space aliens the day of the performance. I have the opera's adapted libretto (no score) if you are interested in seeing how the opera company adapted it.