We celebrated the end of the 2014 schooling year last night with our schools Gala performance, on their school oval.
My primary school as a kid, Tieri State School (whoo), had an annual tradition of a concert, put on for family and friends.
Each class at the school would spend the last half of term (or the whole term, depending on the teachers enthusiasm) preparing for this concert.
There were no guidelines as such. Each class could perform a skit or a play, sing a song, do a dance or tell a story.
Every child was involved, and I always remember love, love, loving this time of year.
Of course it’s different now, held at the oval I do believe, but when I was there, there wasn’t a great number of families, or classes, so the concert was always held at our civic centre. Like a town hall I guess.
Parents and non school siblings would cram into the hall, while every class would sit outside in their groups, or in the dressing rooms, or the wings, waiting their turn on stage.
Us kids would then sneakily watch all the other classes perform while waiting for it to be over, then run off and find our bored parents to go home.
Without fail, “Its a Small World”, was performed.
Every.
Single.
Year.
Different grade, possibly the same teacher, I’m not sure, but it is now a symbol of Tieri concerts for me.
Some other memorable acts I recall;
My middle sisters class doing “Still call Australia home”, the year above us doing, “Leader of the Pack”, the year below us doing a song I now can’t recall (possibly Brian Adams), but in sign language, dressed in black, on a black backdrop, lights out, black light on and WHITE GLOVES!!!! That was awesome!
2 years above us did “Ally Oop”, with heaps of dinosaurs, our class doing “Walk like an Egyptian” and once a universal performance with songs from Japan, Israel and a few other countries,(I sang in the lead duo, oh yeah), we did an ABBA medley one year and my most memorable was our year 6 rap.
6. M, 6. M.C. Come on sing this song with me. 6.M, 6.M.C….and so on and so forth with a catchy little rhyme for each of us. And no, MC wasn’t a rap term then, our teachers name was Mc-something, and he was clearly down with rapping rhymes.
We also had a fantastic teacher who was in her element come concert time, she was AMAZING with backdrops, thanks Miss Way!*
The amount of effort put in by teachers, writing awesome raps, teaching dance moves and songs, as well as all that pesky actual teaching they had to do, made for such a fantastic evening!
These days there’s no time for such creativity, and at our school they nearly did away with our end of year Gala, but families weren’t ready to let this go, so the evening still stands. Hoorah!
It was no neon, sign language song, but it was still great!
Happy end of School for 2014!!!
G2 and G3 performing their songs, G2’s year sang Katie Perry’s Roar and G3’s year sang an altered version of Taylor Swifts Shake it Off, Work it Out.
*She made a fantastic Christopher Columbus ship in year 5 I think! It was practically life-size, very clever lady.
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