WELCOME BACK!!!

Hello Parents and Students!

Welcome back to what is sure to be the most exciting year yet here at Nativity of Our Lord! I hope that everyone has had a wonderful summer and is ready to jump back into their musical studies. This year we will be seeing a large number of positive changes here in our Fine and Performing Arts programs. The biggest and most important being our new music curriculum, the National Core Arts Standards (NCAS). These standards will help take our general music classes into the future, helping to provide students with more realistic approaches to understanding and creating music. What should you know as a parent? Well it's very simple, the NCAS are meant to help your student create, perform, respond, and connect to music in a way that our previous studies did not. In short we will be using new methods of creating music (i.e. iPads/recording studios), performing while interfacing with multimedia, responding to new styles and cultures, and forming personal connections to music that will be unique to each student. All in all it should be a hoot!

With these new standards comes new toys! Ms. Maddaloni has been gracious enough to equip our music room with two fully functional recording studios powered by MacBook Airs and six iPads which will be interfacing with MIDI technology to help provide a platform for creating in ways we never could! Our younger students will be composing and performing using Boomwhackers which believe it or not are even more fun than they sound. It is going to be a pretty amazing year here at Nativity.

As always I invite you to join us in our after school band program which is entering its 4th year (information to come soon) and our PAWS theater program which will be performing its 4th show in just 3 years, and without further a due, this years show will be............................ something awesome! We will announce our show soon so please have your 5th-8th grade students keep their ears open for when our first meeting will be.

I look forward to an amazing year and cannot wait to see the wonderful music that your students will create!

-Mr. Myers