Students at Horfield School in Bristol are celebrating World Ocean Day with a bit of a twist. They’ll be singing their Song of the Sea in celebration of the ocean.
“The inspiration for Song of the Sea came when assistant headteacher Kirsten Cunningham attended a Science STEM summit with students and other schools from across Bristol and North Somerset. Here, the children spent a day learning about the ocean and the problems of plastic pollution and the team leading the STEM project challenged every school to make a difference.
As we are passionate about Performing Arts, we decided that we’d make a difference through music and send a message as a song. We challenged our pupils to write poems about the ocean, the words from which inspired the lyrics for our song. I then set this to music, we created a YouTube video and the song set sail on its journey!
Since launching the song, we have been featured in a local BBC news report, invited to sing at the launch in Bristol of a plastic fishing boat by HubbubUk (the boat is one of four touring the country; made of plastic recovered from the river Thames, and aims to ‘fish’ plastic from our city waterways) and the children have been invited to sing the song to the City Council at a debate on the climate emergency.
Our aspiration is that as many schools as possible sing our song, to send its message as far as possible. The song is suitable for whole-school singing, or with a smaller group such as a school choir. There is a harmony part in the final two choruses, which can be taken by a semi-chorus group – through this second part, some possible solutions to the problem of plastic pollution are powerfully communicated. The resources are all contained in the description on YouTube, with a link to a free downloadable score, lyrics sheet and backing track. The video also has subtitled lyrics so children can sing along with the video.
We will be singing #HorfieldSongoftheSea on June 7th, to mark World Oceans Day, and we are challenging every other school to sing our song on that day!”
Article by Claire Alsop, Horfield School
There are loads of ways for your school to get involved in World Ocean Day for Schools on June 7th – sign up for FREE here, and check out all our free resources, lesson plans, activity planners and assembly tools here.
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