School Christmas concerts can be an agonizing affair. I know from experience. Fortunately, so does our principal. She is new to the school but she had some great ideas about how to make tonight’s performances go smoothly.

The first change was that we didn’t use the stage. It has terrible acoustics anyway.

What we did was have all of the classes sit together around the stage area (an open section of floor at one end of the gym). We had spot lights set up so that the stage area was lighted well and it actually felt like a stage.

I think it was great having the classes sit together all around the stage area. This gave plenty of room for the dancing acts to move around when it was their time to perform. For the singing acts, such as my class, when it was our time to perform, all we had to do was stand up and go.

This was a great way to run a school Christmas concert. We didn’t have to figure out how to enter and exit the stage. This saved a lot of time.

I also tried something new for this concert. I had the entire student body sing a song together to close out the show. I was a little nervous that we wouldn’t be able to pull it off. I had put a lot of work into putting it all together over the past several weeks. But it worked.

The students sang great and I got a lot of compliments for my conducting and organizing the school-wide choir. It was pretty cool. I’d like to try it again. Perhaps a spring concert, hmmm, (just thinking out loud.)

Anyway, it was a great night. And possible the most painless Christmas concert I have ever been a part of in my teaching career thus far. That’s saying a lot when I had 130 kids singing all at one time.

Success! It feels good.