What's That On Your Head?

This week C, R and I went on a overnight field trip with the middle school to a music camp as chaperons. It works out so nicely that the three of us have kids in the choir. We always have way too much fun when we get together so we decided that this was a must adventure. I always get a bit worried that they will stop letting us be chaperons together because they know we act like kids. But they do, and we love it. Because of some snow day problems the orchestra ended up going up with the choir so it was a pretty big group with all the 6th, 7th and 8th graders.

The first night we got asked to go with the orchestra. Well, we kinda came to hang out with our kids, but sure why not. The orchestra was divided up into beginning and advanced workshops with one professional clinician for the two to share. Their school teacher was supposed to be working with the beginners but she only got them tuned up and wanted them to practice amongst themselves for the remaining 45 minutes of the workshop so she could go observe the teaching style of the clinician. Really, you are just leaving us in here for 45 minutes with no direction to the kids other than practice? This played out for about 5 minutes until the three of us started getting a headache. Ok, time to organize things!

The three of us took turns living out our dreams of conducting an orchestra and being just silly. We even had the kids get into a conga line and we walked around the room while they played. C introduced to the kids the karate style of conducting and they knew when to stop playing because she held the crane pose. When the older group came in we did the same thing except they could actually play some cool songs so R and I did some river dancing and some hoe downing to their awesome fiddle music. We wanted them to be able to focus on their music while we tried to distract them. Good lesson, huh? We thought so. One of the kids found it so amusing that he shot video of us from his phone that I am praying doesn't make it online. To help combat the rowdiness problem we taught them a song. We would say; "what's that on your head?" and they replied "a wig" in a high pitched sing song voice. It worked great at getting their attention and they loved it.

Chaperons that are mean and want to keep kids in line all the time we are not, although R gave it a good shot at looking mean. You just have to get creative and make things fun and the next thing you know 45 minutes has flown by like 5. It was fun to hear the talk around camp about the 3 moms that were in with the orchestra. We were pegged "the fun moms." That's one label I am happy to take. :)