Paddington Bear's First Online Concert
for
Primary Schools
Why not bring your school on a wonderful musical adventure with Paddington Bear which sees you cover material from across the national curriculum through our interactive workshops and culminates with a fabulous bespoke performance of Paddington Bear's First Concert for your school. Since June 2021 this project has been enjoyed in primary schools across England and Wales.
A short work of c35 minutes by composer Herbert Chappell and written for piano and narrator, Paddington Bear's First Concert is a tale about Paddington Bear and his journey to London, being found at Paddington Station, settling into London life, his friendship with Mr Gruber and the funny experience of him attending his first concert with Mr Gruber in the Royal Albert Hall.
The originality and passion which Harmony's Music Club brings to Paddington Bear's First Concert with its interactive approach saw their first online performance in 2020 attract a great deal of attention - it was promoted on social media by Stephen Fry (who has recorded the work himself), Hugh Bonneville, and BBC Radio Surrey and BBC Radio Sussex. You can hear Caroline & Liz talking about Padding Bear's First Concert on BBC Radio with Emily Jeffery if you click the link above. The concert was viewed globally over 2,000 times within 1 month and on concert day it was watched live in South Africa, Mexico, Chile, the USA, Canada and the UK!
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The interactive approach, where children play along when suggested with their home-made instruments and their artwork appears on the big screen illustrating the story, generates much excitement for the children and grown-ups alike!
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Information for Schools about our Paddington Bear Concert & Workshops Package
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Trailer for Schools
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Summary
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Harmony’s Music Club has designed a unique interactive concert and music-video workshop package for primary schools, suitable for the classroom and home-learning, on the theme of Paddington Bear’s First concert. It is delivered by Harmony's Music Club's music educator and classical pianist Caroline Page and narrator Liz Franklin-Kitchen and offers children an exciting opportunity to learn, enjoy and participate in a wide range of experiences covering music, science, art and design and English.
A truly cross-curricular project and one that is relevant for #EYFS, #KS1 and #KS2, through participating in the project the children will:
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work scientifically, using their critical thinking skills while predicting, exploring and experimenting with different materials (including assessing suitability), finding patterns with sounds and pitches and selecting their preferences and creating their own concert instruments;
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explore body percussion including beatboxing;
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be encouraged to use their voices and instruments expressively and creatively to join in improvising sound effects in response to stimuli in one of our short-stories;
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use their art and design skills to illustrate the concert with up to c120 items being included in the video performance;
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play singing warm-up games where they learn to use their voices expressively and creatively;
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learn Paddington Bear’s Theme Song using aural recall skills and practicing listening with attention to detail. They also have the option of audio recording themselves and sending it to us to create a virtual choir for the concert;
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get to join in with and enjoy a 'live' musical performance
and more!
For further information on how the workshops, challenges and concerts operate and tie into the curriculum please feel free to download and print off these information sheets:
Information for Schools
Information for Sponsors
Take a look inside!
Here are some snippets of video footage from the workshops:
Art Workshop Excerpt
Singing Warm-Up Excerpt
Improvisation Workshop Excerpt
Teaching the Paddington Bear Theme Song
Train Whistle Workshop Excerpt
Drums Workshop Excerpt
Castanets Workshop Excerpt
Shakers Workshop Excerpt
Tick-Tock Workshop Excerpt
And here are some audio clips of the concert crying out for illustrations by the children:
If you would like to see more, please contact us and we can arrange a viewing of the material.
Practical Information
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1. Payment
After registering via the form below, we will be in touch about your chosen concert date. We will not ask you to make any payment until we have confirmed the availability of your chosen concert date. The complete package costs £250.
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2. The Video Workshops
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Once we have received your payment you will receive a welcome email containing a password for the Paddington Bear Resources page on our website. All of the video workshops are accessible from here and will be available from 1 March 2021.
The workshops are designed so that you can play them over a shared-screen on Teams or other education platform, or for children to be able to do at home. We have a lot of experience in putting fun musical video activities together for children (our videos have been enjoyed thousands of times around the world), including instrument making and musical exploration.
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3. Making Instruments
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We believe in poverty proofing music and so we make our instruments out of materials found around the home/school to make this activity as accessible as possible.
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4. Artwork
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Children love seeing their pictures on screen and seeing them in a concert context adds to that excitement! There is a long list of artwork subjects for the concert, all of which are listed out in the art video and we love to include all submitted artwork. There is no minimum standard for artwork and if we end up with 100 Paddington Bears and nothing else, that doesn't matter! We will still include all 100 Paddington Bears in the concert. We do however encourage different subjects to be covered!
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We recommend a maximum number of 130 pictures per concert to ensure that the concert doesn't become too chaotic. It may therefore be that you require 2 concerts for particularly large schools or for different year groups in large schools. We can discuss pricing for multiple concerts with you.
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Don't worry, we're not asking children to send their artwork to you to sort through! You will be given your own email address in the welcome email for parents to be able to send pictures to and we will do the rest. We like to include all artwork we receive, so please think about how many pictures you might want to ask the children to make when deciding what to do - we know that not all children join in, and that some produce multiples!
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Once we have received all of the pictures which are to be included by the children it will take us 2 weeks to put the film together for you. We will include the cut-off date for us to receive artwork in the welcome email we send you.
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5. Singing
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We know that not everyone is comfortable with singing in the classroom at present and our singing workshops are therefore designed to be undertaken at home too. There are warm-ups, games, and the theme song itself which we teach you with the piano accompaniment.
For children who choose to record themselves singing the song, we have a full instruction worksheet for how to do this - we use the same method we have used when recording virtual choirs for our other concerts which families have found very user friendly. We only ask for an audio track and all recordings sent to us are included. As with the artwork, recordings should be sent by families to the email address which we provide in your welcome email.
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6. Timing
We recommend having at least a 4-5 week lead-time between when we confirm your booking and concert day to give you and the children time to enjoy the process of producing art work, making recordings and undertaking the workshops. Afterall this is designed to be a pleasurable experience and the last thing we want is for this to be a stressful for anyone! This is especially so for smaller schools where more art work is needed from each child to populate the concert! We do however have some of our own artwork which we can always pop in to help illustrate if you need! Plus, we need two weeks to turn your concert around once we've received the art work so don't forget to factor that in to how long a lead time you need!
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