Assembly

At my school, one of the defining attributes of the lower school (what we would call elementary school) is the sense of community across the grade levels. One of the reasons for that is weekly assembly. Every Friday morning, first thing, the entire elementary school gathers and has a 30 minute assembly. This is planned and performed entirely by students. No adults talking, talking, talking away, just the kids showing work they have done, sharing ideas from school projects or playing musical instruments.

Well, this week's assembly was hosted by my class. Each class takes a turn hosting the assembly throughout the year and any class can perform during your assembly, but your class is responsible for most of it.

I was nervous. Thirty minutes is a lot of time to fill especially when you have 4 year-olds and anxious parents watching all at the same time. I decided it needed to be fairly structured and that every child would get at least one speaking part. Our program was as follows:

L and D do welcome

M. was the MC and introduced each act.

Class recites poem (Thank you, Robert Frost!)

A played the piano

J played guitar

P from other class read story

JK and T show math short cut

JK, T, AW, and LO do birthdays (each child who has a birthday that week is interviewed and sung to)

Student council gives announcements

TM and F give the closing statements

It started off really good. L and D were wonderful with the welcome. Everyone remembered their lines to "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening". It just so happened that the poem has 14 unique lines and I have 14 students so each had a line to say. M was loving his role as the MC. And just as we finished the poem and were waiting for M to go and introduce A, M runs toward me with his hand over his face.

He had gotten a bloody nose...right in the middle of the poem. Thankfully, his dad was there and helped clean him up, but I had to quickly grab a random kid to introduce the other acts while M was being cleaned up. A was okay with his piano solo, Big Beat, a jazzy tune with lots of accidentals. J was a hit with his rendition of "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" by AC/DC.

By the time P had finished his story, M was cleaned up and ready to jump in again. JK and T did a great job showing a cool trick with your hands for finding out the 9x table. The birthdays were a bit disorganized, but oh well. Student council did their bit including a reminder to flush the toilets which left all the kids in stitches so they hardly heard TM and F say goodbye.

Overall, not too bad for the first time.

I'm glad it's over though. It was way too much stress this early in the year!