About This Year's Concert
This year's Christmas concert was designed to enhance student involvement. While every child might not play an instrument or perform a dance at the concert, all children have learned all the parts for their performance in class. Curricular goals to do with singing, rhythm, and playing skills were worked into the performance and show some of the many things we do in class all of the time as part of your child's Fine Arts education at Mills Haven.
Much of what you will see on stage comes to us from the approach to music education called "Orff-Schulwerk." It involves active participation through, playing, dancing, singing, and speech. Along with the Kodály approach, it is the one of the most popular approaches for elementary music education in North America. Much of the Fine Arts program at Mills Haven is also heavily influenced by the Kodály approach to music education in addition to the Orff approach.
The Orff approach combines singing, dancing, speech, playing, and often includes an element of drama.
Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman built the Orff approach to music education together based on earlier work that Carl Orff did with dancer Dorothee Günther at the Gunter-Schule.
Watch below as notable Orff-Schulwerk expert Doug Goodkin talks about music education and how the Orff approach can fit within the framework of a Fine Arts program.