3A small school directors. I need some help and advice.
I am graduating 17 seniors and my HS band will be close to 28 students left. With that being said many of our middle school students really want to participate! I am excited for them, but I want to build this correctly so here are some questions maybe any of you 3A guys can answer or give me some ideas?
1. Do you hold a spring camp for all your students for marching? If so, how many days? April or May? Do you focus on marching fundamentals and playing or both?
2. What do your July/August band camp days look like? For example I do 8-4 Monday-Thursday. I want to change to night rehearsal due to the excessive heat from last year.
3. How do you make the camps fun for everyone so we dont burn out our middle school students?
Thanks your input!
Re: Ideas
Posted by DesertJazz on 4/1/2024, 4:37 pm, in reply to "Ideas"
1) No. My main reason is I don't want to scare kids off to be honest. I also don't know how much retention of skills you really gain from doing something like that? I think if I was in a larger district with multiple feeders I would probably do it, but not with one middle school and one high school.
3) I only use middle school students in the front ensemble, so I'm not worried about general seventh/eighth graders. I would say the same things that can work for your older students too. Get leadership on board, I've seen them give popsicles out, posters, get them to as a section go do stuff outside of camp, etc. I know many others have better ideas on this front than I do.