Last half term, Stuart told the children that they would be creating and performing their very own ‘Year 5 The Musical’. We discussed in pairs what a musical is and listed as many musicals as we could. These included; ‘Matilda’, ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Mary Poppins’. We discussed how they include both singing and acting and how an opera musical involves more. We watched ‘The Magic Flute’ which showed us how the acting seen in other musicals is present in an opera musical that tells the story through singing. The story is based around a man going to another world meeting a princess, however, the princess’ Mum isn’t happy about this decision and wants to kill the man. We learnt that Mozart wrote the play, which included him giving away other people’s secrets in the musical itself.
Stuart then asked the children what sort of theme they wanted their musical to be. Some of our thoughts included; Matilda themed, football themed and Michael Jackson themed. In the end, they decided that the musical was going to be linked to a naughty class, who jump through a hole called ‘the downside up’, that turns the class into a good class. The good class try to lure people into their world, which in turn, traps the teacher as well as other pupils.
We looked at what Intro song we were going to be singing and performing for our musical. We decided that ‘Naughty’ from The Matilda musical was the perfect song for us to start our musical with. The children sang the song together all the way through to begin with. Stuart then split up sections of the song to learn each word and note. The children then auditioned for one section of the song that requires a solo. We then started to audition for who will be the teacher in the musical. We then auditioned for the parts of the parents in our musical, ‘Mr and Mrs Fullerwell’. The children were told by Stuart on the spot to act out certain scenarios. Stuart then auditioned for the parts of 2 naughty children.
When we finished our first scene, we moved onto thinking what our next song could be about ‘entering a new upside down world’ and we came up with ‘Upside Down’ by Diana Ross. We then discussed how we needed to morph from the naughty class into the good class. Stuart showed the children how they needed to act to change, as well as the teacher acting surprised walking into his brand new, well-behaved class. We also learnt the song ‘Do-Re-Mi’ from The Sound of Music, that we added into our musical after the children were transformed into well-behaved children. After the children arrived into the ‘down-side up’, Mr Fullerwell returns and the children sing ‘Into the unknown’. We practised singing the song in chunks throughout the lesson. Another song linked to our musical is going to be ‘Running up that hill’ by Kate Bush. so we will be practising this over the next few weeks.
