Hooray for Friday!

I am so blessed not to have any commitments tonight. I have been able to do some cleaning, organize last year's lesson plans (from church) and get caught up on typing up this years plans. Our K-4th concert is towards the end of May and I only have 7 classes left, so concert planning has been also added to the list. While planning the concert at church is a lot of work (in many ways more work than planning my concerts for my string kids), it is relatively low stress because I program things we have been working on over the course of the year. The challenge is planning material that the parents haven't heard before. I have been teaching some of the 4th graders since they were in kindergarten!

Since the kindergarten and 1st grade will perform together for the concert, I started having them come together last week. It is nice because instead of teaching five classes each week, now I am only teaching four. The downside is that now 20 kids are trying to have a music class in a room that is too small for us. And yes, we do folk dancing--which to the passerby looks like controlled chaos. Today's challenge: multitasking. Two of the girls in the class are sisters. While they are a year apart they are so similar that it is easy to mistake them for twins. This proved to be a problem for me as I had a hard time remembering who was who while I was trying to teach them how to do-si-do, keep the chaos under control, and be some child's partner. It really is a riot. But thankfully each week gets a little better as they (slowly) learn to discipline/control their dancing. At least the small room keeps them confined as we are working on it!