News

Ms Michell reports on a new innovation at the Academy....

A little bit of Brazil hits Oakwood Park!

What better way to jazz up a hot morning and mobilise the students in the home straight of the year end, than to grab a big loud drum and hit it really, REALLY, loud!

Drum sticks in hand and expectant smiles on faces we all skipped over to the sports field and under the shade of the trees we bashed out a beat that had clearly been worked on for many lessons in the music department.

Mr Beharrell and co. have spent all term behind the scenes meticulously teaching the Year 8s all there is to know about Samba.  Yep that’s right, wood block, snare drum, pandeiro, surdo, the lot.  With a bang of the tamborim and a shake of the agogo bells, all 150 students headed out to the field to perform to the teachers everything they had learnt in class this term.  A crescendo if you will, of learning!

Interleaving our cross curricular activities, Samba was first performed in Brazil on sugar plantations by slaves forced over from Africa.  Modifying Africa’s traditional drumming music, Samba musicians use a great variety of instruments to create beautiful upbeat and rhythmic composition.  The students were grouped into musical instrument type and sounded up a storm, with the tamborims beating, the snare drums banging, the surdos weaving a baseline and the ganza’s rattling a rhythmic undertone.

Each group was perfectly practiced and knew what to do next; it was like watching poetry in motion.  Mr Beharrell was the hostess with the most’ess and spent the performance using theatrical hand gestures to conduct the orchestra, running from one drum line to the other in quick succession.  It was a sight and sound to behold and I would defy any bystander from having an involuntary toe tap to a full blown hands in the air ‘hooray’.

Well done the music department and the Year 8 students for giving us all a right corker of a show, a special treat for the end of term and for giving us all something to sing and dance about!!