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One of the highlights of the educational year is the Christmas Concert. Just as Christmas toys, decorations and cards appear in all the shops from September 1st, so begins the planning, organising and rehearsing of the concert.
Concerts are for parents, grandparents, friends, relations, carers. They are delightfully happy times when everyone swells with pride and wipes away a tear.
For early years staff they are an absolute nightmare.
They disrupt every aspect of daily/weekly routine, are mentally/physically/emotionally exhausting and cost a fortune. Practitioners buy lots of sparkly material and bits, sitting up all night creating wonderful costumes which children then refuse to wear on the day or, if they do wear them, proceed to wee or be sick all over them.
If by some miracle (the miracle of Christmas?) they arrive on stage wearing a costume intact they will then spent the entire performance picking all the sparkly bits off and if they run out of sparkly bits they then attack their neighbour's bits.
I recall concert rehearsals where one of our children would lie on the stage sobbing loudly and intensely because he wanted to be a star and not a cracker. We eventually gave in but then he changed his mind because the stars sat on the other side of the stage. Finally we made him two costumes so he could decide for himself what he wanted to be on concert day. And in the end he was an angel (not an angel in costume but beautifully behaved and even managed to stop picking his nose for a few moments).
Concerts can be traditional - The Nativity - or can be themed around Father Christmas or Santa bringing toys to everyone, which leads to lots of jolly, traditional songs like When Santa Got Stuck up the Chimney, Rudolph or Jingle Bells.
Or it could be based on the song The Twelve Days of Christmas.
I have been teaching for 26 years. I have done the 12 days of Christmas twice. I am so pleased that The Twelve Days of Christmas is not due to happen for at least another 10 years by which time I should have retired and if I havent actually retired, after another 10 years of working with young children I will be mentally out of it anyway.
Our first Twelve Days of Christmas involved 3 reception classes. 24 children had acting parts and the rest were the singers - which meant they were placed at the front of the stage, quite obviously clueless as to what on earth was going on around them. Twelve children sat on chairs with pictures representing the items - 2 turtle doves, 5 gold rings, etc. Twelve children stood behind the chairs with corresponding numbers from 1 to 12.
The theory was that as we sang the song the person on the chair with the picture and the person behind with the matching number stood up at the appropriate time. We thought this would be quite a simple way to represent the song. Children never make things quite that easy though...
Five Gold Rings just sat slumped miserably on his chair throughout the entire performance despite being hissed and poked at by his numbered partner who even pushed him off his chair at one point in an effort to persuade him to join in. Other children just bobbed up and down at will, while the few children who actually understood what was going on, rushed around the stage dragging people up from their chairs or sitting them down again, then getting upset when they were in the wrong position when their time came to perform. It was a complete disaster!
But the second Twelve Days of Christmas was even worse. I now work with two young, very enthusiastic staff who thought it would be a good idea for a Christmas concert. After my first experience we finally agreed that I would have nothing to do with it, and that they would plan and organise the whole thing.
They decided it would be interesting to have groups of children to represent the characters in the song. Adults would propel them onto the stage from one side and then more adults would remove them from the other side.
Some children, once they were actually on the stage, refused to come off again. They relished having an audience and decided to do twirly dances till they fell over. Others got stage fright and remained glued to the spot or tried to escape through the back curtains - usually after weeing themselves. Some treated it like a normal day, chatting to their partners, waving to family members and re-arranging their underwear. We finally resorted to having a student dressed up as a pear tree on the stage to try to move at least some of the children in the right direction.
I never did quite understand why we had about 10 turtle doves (costumes easy to make?) and only 2 lords-a-leaping. There were no maids-a-milking as they were both off ill on concert day. Not that any of it was my concern. My job was to play the piano badly which I did. And of course I saw adults in the audience wiping away a tear though I think they were probably crying with relief that it was finally all over.
Wonder what we're doing this Christmas?
Exclusively for the Foundation Stage Forum - copyright Dee Hayday © December 2004. All rights reserved