SAME has been keenly organising and hosting webinars to support our music colleagues across a range of areas of music education.
Our hugely popular webinar, Musical Fun in Primary 1, held in April, began our series of online sessions for 2022, geared primarily, as the title suggests, towards supporting Primary 1 classroom teachers (non-specialists) and was led by Donna Minto, Kate Picken and Amanda Massie.
Making Thinking Visible, presented by Laura MacMillan, which took place in May 2022, introduced the approach to colleagues across Scotland and provided a range of teaching and learning strategies and resources for use in the classroom.
In June 2022, Sir James MacMillan and Jennifer Martin of The Cumnock Tryst collaborated with SAME to present a webinar on composition which featured details of Sir James MacMillan’s new book – Creative Composition for the Classroom.
Finishing off the year, in early December we continued the composition theme with a webinar entitled, ‘Composition for BGE – Ideas for getting started in the BGE classroom’. This was led by John Gourlay (instrumental) and Greg Brown (technology), giving two very different and valuable approaches to this subject.
Looking forward to our upcoming webinars, the evening of February 23rd will introduce a P7/S1 transition project that has been up and running in Aberdeenshire for a number of years. This will be followed on March 23rd with a webinar detailing a class-band type P7/S1 transition project with the aim over both webinars to support both classroom and instrumental colleagues to in turn support learners as they move from music learning in the primary school to music learning in the secondary school.
All our webinars have been attractively priced and well attended. Participant feedback has been extremely positive with an overwhelming sentiment of enjoyment of the online presentations. However, participants have also expressed a desire to return to in-person events in whatever way this is possible. With this in mind, SAME is looking to provide in-person events again in the not too distant future. At this stage these would be done on a satellite basis rather than a full conference situation. There have been discussions with several bodies as to content and geographical placing for these in-person events and SAME hopes to be able to advertise such events soon.
SAME is always looking to support all music educators across the country and would welcome suggestions for future events which would be of particular interest to you. Please feel free to contact SAME via the website – www.same.org.uk with any proposals or ideas you may have.