From BHS Choir to BHS Choirs Welcome back, BHS Choir students, families, and friends! First and foremost, there is very exciting news to share. This year I am so pleased to announce that BHS Choir is expanding to BHS Choirs with the addition of our brand new Treble Choir! It has been a long time since Bastrop High School had multiple choirs, so I cannot express how humbled and proud I am to see our program grow large enough to support two choir ensembles during the 2022-23 school year! The new Treble Choir will feature a selected group of young ladies with excellent musicianship & sight-reading skills performing advanced-level treble music. We are certainly on our way to creating a truly magnificent choral program here at Bastrop High School, and I am so thankful to each and every one of you for your support, dedication, and encouragement of BHS Choir. We certainly couldn't have made it to this milestone without you! Now that we are officially BHS Choirs, it's time to look at the busy school year ahead. The 2022-23 choir season is full of concerts, informal performances, tours, and special events for our BHS Choirs students to participate in throughout the year. Attached is the 2022-23 Master Schedule, please add these dates to your calendar as soon as possible! Dates in BOLD are MANDATORY; all other dates are optional. Our wonderful BHS Choirs Officers and I are also working on a Social Events calendar for the school year with dates of all the extra fun activities planned for our choir students! (For example, our "Back-to-School Social" this Friday after school!) I will send out this Social Events calendar as soon as it is finalized. We have a busy and exciting season this year! There is no hiding it; the larger our BHS Choirs program gets, the more opportunities we have as a program to perform and get involved with the community. Including the new dates on the calendar, we are also expanding our after school rehearsal routine to weekly after school rehearsals for each choir. These rehearsals are not year-round, although there is an optional year-round rehearsal for choir students who would like extra practice time, or practice time on solo events. Treble Choir (Vocal Ensemble) will meet every MONDAY from 4:45 - 5:45 PM; Mixed Choir (Choir I-IV) will meet every TUESDAY from 4:45 - 5:45 PM. These after school rehearsals will only run during the most important months of our season: FALL 2022: September - November; SPRING 2023: January - March. After school rehearsals are required for all BHS Choir students and are an integral part to our success as a choral program. Please put these weekly rehearsals in your calendar as soon as possible and plan accordingly. If your student cannot stay after school due to transportation needs, please let me know ASAP so that I can work with other BHS Choir families to potentially arrange transportation for your child! In addition to our Master Calendar, we also have a newly redone website where you can find all of this information and more. There are still some areas of the website under construction, but I hope to have the finished product for you by September 1st. The website will house our performance schedules, as well as the BHS Choir Handbook, handouts, forms, and other important information for BHS Choir students and families. Very glad to have this resource available for our students and families, as well as those looking to learn more about our choral program here at BHS. Finally, we have our goals for the year. Each year, I create goals I'd like the students (and myself) to achieve over the course of the school year. This year, our goals are simple: 1. Learn all choir students names. - This may seem too simple, but now that we are BHS Choirs with two sections of choir, some students will not see the choir students except those in their own class. I'd like for our choral program to keep that wonderful sense of community we've built over the past few years even while split into 2 classes; to put it simply, I'd like to create opportunities for every choir student's name to be known by their peers. All are welcome, so we must welcome them by name to show them they will always have a place here in our choral program. 2. Visit Bastrop Middle School Choirs at least 2x per semester. - We are working with the BMS Choir director to find times that BHS Choirs can visit BMS Choirs for an after school rehearsal, social event, or simply to help our middle school singers get ready for high school choir. The more time and energy we give to getting to know of BMS choirs, the more likely it will be that they join choir when they arrive at BHS! These dates are not on the calendar attached; I will communicate these dates and times when they are finalized. 3. Improve sight-reading skills. - Sight-reading is the skill characterized by singing through a piece of music without prior practice. For example, when BHS Choirs travel to UIL competition in March, the 2nd portion of our evaluation is a sight-reading exercise in which our students are given a brand new piece of music and asked to sing it with only 7 minutes of practice! In order for our students to feel more confident in their sight-reading skills, we need to spend more time practicing and developing this skill. We will be spending quite a bit of time in class and after school this year developing our students sight-reading skills in order to better their overall musicianship. 4. MORE SOCIAL EVENTS. - Last year we had the busiest choir season BHS Choirs has seen in quite a while. This year will be no different, especially with the weekly after school rehearsals in major months. To balance out this busy and taxing schedule, I have tasked the BHS Choirs Officer with developing a Social Events calendar filled with optional social events for our choir students. These events will always be optional, but are meant to provide our students with opportunities to have fun and build relationships with each other outside of rehearsals. These socials will include events such as "game night", "movie night", picnics, arts & crafts & other fun social activities. 5. Earn a "1" at UIL Concert & Sight-Reading Evaluation. - This goal is last on the list, but certainly not least. A rating of "1" is considered Superior at the UIL evaluation, and I believe that our BHS Choirs this year are both capable of achieving this rating. We will work all year to better our musicianship skills, our singing skills, and our sight-reading skills in order to hit this mark, but more importantly, to build confidence in our singers. They are capable of reaching the stars, so why not shoot for the moon? I am so glad to have you as a member of our choir program here at Bastrop High School, and cannot wait to greet our BHS Choirs kids tomorrow morning. It is my privilege to teach your students each and every day, and I am thankful for the opportunity to show them how music can change their lives for the better. If you have any questions or concerns throughout the school year, please feel free to email me or call the school. Please join the BHS Choirs Parent Remind group for important announcements and reminders throughout the school year (see email from Ms. Davis). Looking forward to an amazing school year this year with an incredible group of kiddos! 1st year as BHS Choirs, here we go! Kindly, Ms. Davis
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