Just a quick post tonight with a picture of my pretty spring flowers. I took my middle school choir to contest last Friday. They did such a great job! They received three excellent ratings on their prepared music and they earned a superior in sight reading.

For those of you who are clueless about sight reading, it works like this. The choir and their director enter the sight reading room where a judge is waiting. A student assistant gives the director a piece of music to study while the same piece of music is being handed out to the students. The students must keep their copies of the music face down until the judge tells them they may look at it. The judge begins a timer when he tells the students they may look at their music. The students and their director now have three minutes to work the music (which they have never seen before). During the three minute period, the choir must learn the rhythm of the music, establish the key that the music is in and attempt to sing the music correctly without accompaniment. When the timer goes off, the choir can sing through the music once with piano accompaniment. The choir is then given one more minute to work through any problems and make any corrections necessary. All the work done during this one minute period is without accompaniment. When the timer goes off again, the pianist gives the starting note or chord only and the choir must sing the music a cappella for final adjudication. Needless to say, sight reading is not an easy task!

The next day I took two high school auditioned ensembles to contest. Both of the ensembles received three excellent ratings on their prepared music. The high school groups also earned excellent ratings in sight reading. All in all, it was a great weekend for my choral program.

I am leaving this Thursday to judge sight reading at another choral contest in Jonesboro which is almost six hours away from where I live. I will be judging Thursday afternoon and evening, all day Friday and all day Saturday.

In the meantime, I am doing research and polling for a report that I will eventually submit to my school administrators. I have to prepare lesson plans for my substitute on Thursday and Friday. I have list of about twenty-five other things that must be done before I leave early Thursday morning. So, I will not be posting or commenting for a while. I hope to catch up with blogging activities next week!