A Very Chamber Adventure

At the 2025 Winter Showcase, the Chamber Orchestra presented A Very Chamber Adventure, a series of short melodic excerpts, paired with live narration, to tell a story of a magical journey through an enchanted forest to get to a birthday party. 

Then, they illustrated images to create a companion picture book!

This year, the Chamber Orchestra is composed of students ranging from 4th to 7th grade, from many different schools and homeschools around the district, with varying levels of playing ability and fluency on their instruments. 

In order to speed up the note-reading process, after we covered notes on a staff to the students, teachers taught specific concepts using 4- to 12- measure excerpts. 

For instance, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" covered stepwise motion and learning by ear. The opening to "We Will Rock You" taught rudimentary counting, eighth notes, and the G Major scale.

Once we had several excerpts under our belts, we started piecing together a plot that tied all of our excerpts together. We workshopped the story together during orchestra rehearsal and there were some incredible instances of cross-ensemble collaboration between students. 

When we performed our piece at the Winter Showcase, this piece was the longest that these students had ever performed.

After the concert and before winter break, Chamber took some time to create collaborative illustrations to accompany our story. Students speed-drew for 3 minutes for a randomly selected prompt and then rotated to their next prompt. Over winter break, Ms. Kim spent some time collaging these drawings into a picture book, accompanied by our bilingual script.