A Samba Send Off For Hartside Year 6

I have been recently working with Sam and a few of the others at Jack Drum Arts in teaching the children at Hartside Primary some carnival arts. Specifically in my case Samba drumming. This has been going on every Thursday morning for the past 6 weeks in the lead up to the students leavers party at their school.

Working with this group has been both challenging and rewarding. For example, in the first week we had to give all of the children a turn at both the drumming and the dance sections of the workshops to get an idea of who would want to take part in each of those. So as you would expect some children didn’t want to do the drumming and some didn’t want to do the dance so the first week was a bit more difficult. 

Throughout the sessions I have been playing the surdo’s keeping them in time at the back of the band and making sure that they know their parts. I think the fastest thing I learned from this was that big drums and children make very tired children when they wear them so for after the first week we opted to use stands for the drums so that they didn’t have to carry the heavy drums. A thing I would have done differently is possibly give them the stands in the first place and a few more of them might have had a more positive experience of playing surdo.

I think the biggest thing however that I’ve learned from these sessions is although I am listening to Sam at the front I need to also make sure that the children are engaged and not staring off into space when playing. They tend to do this as the surdo parts are a bit more easy but it is very easy for them to lose track of the tune or go out of time. Thus I have been making sure to make eye contact with them and show them their parts on the drums I am playing alongside them and also to make it fun by having little dances with them while we play. Otherwise they turn off and their attention quickly changes to something else in the room or a tree outside the window. Anything other than the drums.

The music we have been teaching them is building up to their year 6 leavers party where we will be performing with the children in a carnival style gig with costumes, music and puppets for the children to have a final goodbye to their old school in the moving up to secondary. I personally can’t wait to showcase their new found talents of drumming and dancing to their parents and school. I also can’t wait to see the awesome costumes that we will be wearing with them. It is going to be a special gig for them and a memory that will live with a lot of them for quite a long time.

With 1 week to go before the big day we took the kids outside to see how they will cope with playing drums outside as it changes the whole dynamic of the drums sounds. They were starting to get it and listen to each other and starting to gel more. This week we were also down a participant which changed the set up of the band but they pulled through like troopers and blasted their way through the songs. Now all that's left to do is to smash this gig out and for them to showcase all of their hard work paying off!

All the hard work these young people have put into this project payed off massively they absolutely brought a whole carnival spirit to the school of Hartside. It was really rewarding for me as a leader to see the young people enjoying playing samba outside and not only playing but dancing and shouting and smiling and enjoying every moment of their gig. To see the parents enjoying the gig too was amazing as they got a chance to see their children doing something that without us they probably would never have had the opportunity to do. I can also already see we have some potential interest in a few of them joining for more sessions in the future which will be amazing if we can keep going and keep on working with some of these young people and who knows these young people could be the next wave of young leaders…