When put on the creative spot, many kids respond with a shrug, a shuffle and an “I dunno!” What do you think we could put on this poster? What kind of card would you like to make? What would you like to write about, draw or create? "I DUNNO!"— the response of someone reluctant or unfamiliar with the creative process. From our very first Little Opera class every year, we ask for many creative opinions. The kids make everything up, and we start right away asking about settings and characters. There are always the shufflers or the shy ones, and kids who lack confidence or experience in the creative process. Children don’t start life afraid to make things — that creative spark atrophies with lack of use. The adult who says, “I am not creative at all” was conditioned to be that way. If I ran the schools instead of just taught in them, I would guarantee ...
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Hi, I'm Ryan, a student at Little Opera. I love it there! It's fantastic. We compose, create props and sets and anything related to opera. At Little Opera, I feel like myself. I get to share my thoughts without being embarrassed. I call it "A Forest of Melodies & Rhythms." p.s. I'm also the class blogger. Ryan interviewed two of his fellow Tchaikovsky classmates (our middle school group) about their experience at Little Opera. Below are the results of his short interviews. Ivy is a fabulous singer! She is also a wonderful composer. She says she barely knew a thing about composing, but after coming to Little Opera and learning from the staff of Little Opera, she composed amazing songs. She says she went from "nothing to something." After composing, she feels happy and accomplished. Ana calls Little Opera "A rainbow of personality." She is an awesome person and is ...
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My favorite moments at Little Opera are almost always the ones I didn't plan. They're moments when someone has an idea we all say yes to, and the teachers and students spend the next part of class totally engaged, having a blast, and doing something new. For this past week's greatest moment, we have one of our oldest students, Yaidra, to thank. During break, she and Alex Stein (Little Opera composition teaching artist) were playing around at the piano. In a 2-word composition challenge, Yaidra gave Alex two ingredients (a mood, and a setting), and he improvised something to fit it. They were five or six little pieces in before I realized what was going on, and walked over to listen. "Can we play this with everyone when they get back from break?" Yaidra asked. Of course we could. After Alex flawlessly interpreted a full round of moods and settings (busy downtown; stormy ...
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Gertrude Stookey, a 6th grader in her third year at Little Opera, recently won 2nd place in her middle school science fair for making an intriguing comparison: Do singers talk like ballerinas walk? Can you recognize the characteristics in a singer's voice that distinguishes him or her as a professional in that field the way you can tell a ballerina by her physical posture and poise? Using a spectrogram application on her iPad to record the speaking voices of 9 female singers and 9 female non-singers, Gertrude was able to measure and "photograph" the differences between them. She learned that there are unique overtones present in the voice of a person who uses it as an instrument versus someone who doesn't. Essentially, singers occupy a fuller aural spectrum and reach higher "partials," or regions of their normal speaking voice, than non-singers. It's a beautiful phenomenon, and certainly one that makes sense. When ...
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There’s one foolproof test a teaching artist can do to assess just how engaged his or her students are on any given day, and it’s totally counterintuitive to what you think of when you imagine great teaching. The test is this: Get up, and leave the room.* We put this test into action last week, entirely by accident. Due to a student behavior issue, three of the four instructors working with small groups in one of our classes were forced to step outside the classroom for about ten minutes. That left one instructor inside the room leading a music rehearsal with 2 students. When we left the room, we also had: - 1 student working on puppetry design - 3 students staging a scene, with one of them acting as director - 4 students staging a different scene, with one of them acting as a director At the end of the 10 minutes — more than ...
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I have been a classroom teacher for about 26 years, mostly teaching seven to nine-year-old children in public school. This is my third year as a Teaching Artist for Little Opera. Before Little Opera, I worked with my regular classroom students making mini-operas as in partnership with San Francisco Opera’s ARIA program.  I have been thinking about the differences between working with children in a small after-school program and during a regular school day, trying to accomplish essentially the same thing. And it is so very different! At Little Opera, I work with around 12 students after school, with at least one other teacher, so we are able to have a new kind of creative relationship than any I’ve been able to experience in the past. Conversation. It’s the conversations that make such an impact on the process of creating something, especially something so complicated as opera with the many ...
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When we are young, we are encouraged (one hopes) to learn a little about everything, to experiment with an array of art forms and disciplines to see if any of those languages resonates particularly strongly with who we are and who we are becoming. All those things we are introduced to as young people are potential pathways for our expression, and we are excited by the seeming limitlessness of perspectives on the world. When I think of Little Opera, as often I do, I see a group of sensitive, intelligent, funny kids with opinions and talents and a blossoming artistic consciousness. I also see a group of kids that is happily still on the side of the threshold where the process of discovery and questioning (and rebellion, naturally) is the guiding force. Little Opera students express almost equal excitement for all the activities we plan for them, whether it involves ...
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