Creating A Fifth Grade Band Day:
FIGHTING THE MID-YEAR SLUMP WITH PERFORMANCE
By Jonathan Simonoff and Sherri Calhoun
Do you find it harder, year after year, to get students interested in continuing playing in
band? Or are they interested, but because of technology they don’t have the discipline to
practice an instrument on their own, especially once they get past the pages in the book
that have the notes in the letter heads? Two music teachers from small schools in
northern Maine came up with an idea to spur students on to make it through the end of
that first year of playing.
The greatest motivator encouraging students to play an instrument is to actually play
the instrument and ultimately make music. You may be thinking, “Of course. Kids want
to play songs on their instruments,” but how does one get them to do that with
everything else on their plate? After some discussion, we decided that we wanted to do a
Fifth Grade Band Day. Our thought was to do it during a school day so that all students
could attend. There were no auditions and all students attended regardless of where
they were in the lesson book. In other words there were students who were quite skilled
on their instrument, but there were also students who may or may not have mastered
the first five notes. Our intent was to meet the students where they were.
While this summary goes into details about the first Fifth Grade Band day we have had
the band day two years in a row and have found it to be very successful. We have hosted