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Workshop Calendar: 2024-2025
- September 14, 2024 – Melanie Kang
- October 19, 2024 – Chapter Share!
- February 8, 2025 – Andrea Donahoe
- April 26, 2025 – Kris Olsen
Click links or scroll down for more detail and description
September 14, 2024
9:00am-1:00pm
Cal State East Bay
Melanie Kang
Lions, Lanterns and Ribbons
Plan ahead for Lunar New Year Celebrations in Your Community!
From movement to clapping games, from singing to Orff arrangement, Melanie Kang seeks to make Chinese music, dances, and activities accessible to American teachers and students while simultaneously preserving the authenticity of the culture. In this workshop, Melanie will not only share Chinese New Year Celebration related songs and dances, such as dragon dance, lion dance, and ribbon dance, she has collected in her recently published book Lion, Lanterns, and Ribbons, she will also bring other Chinese traditional stories, children’s games, art-music integration activities that she has explored and tested with her students over the span of a decade. After this workshop in Chinese music, you will be able to throw a Lunar New Year celebration while enhancing your students’ creativity and musical capabilities.
About Melanie:
Melanie Kang is a published author and a national presenter. Raised and educated in the rich tradition of music and art in Xi’an, China, Melanie has collected her childhood songs, games, and folk dances to share in her Orff classroom. In her years of teaching, she has made Chinese music and dances accessible for American teachers by bringing authentic elements of traditional Chinese music to a modern, creative Orff approach.
October 19, 2024
San Francisco School
300 Gaven St. San Francisco, CA 94134
9:00am-1:00pm
Chapter Share!
Join us to Sing, Say, Move, Play!
A variety of NCAOSA chapter members present their own lessons to develop musical skills, connect with community, create and have fun! We hope to include a wide range of topics to educate learners of all backgrounds.
Have you designed something you’d like to share? Have your students created something amazing? Do you have an original all-time favorite lesson? If you’d like to present a short lesson, please submit your interest by September 20th.
February 8, 2025
Location TBD
9:00am-1:00pm
Andrea Donahoe
Where to Begin? A look at inspiration!
Participants will engage in a wide variety of lessons exploring music and movement with the Orff process. Attention will be brought to lesson inspiration: gathering ideas, growing them, and bringing them to life with artistry. Bring your idea seedlings and we’ll help them along!
About Andrea:
Andrea Donahoe teaches K-5 music and movement at Head-Royce School in Oakland, CA. Before HRS, she honed her preschool skills at a private, progressive, Mandarin immersion school in San Francisco and built the foundation for her career at two public elementary schools in Wood Dale, IL. She completed her Orff levels at the San Francisco International Orff Course in 2010 and joined the faculty as a part of the Level 1 Team teaching Basic Orff in 2021. In addition to being an AOSA teacher educator, Andrea has presented workshops and sessions at the local, state, and national level and has been an active leader in her local Orff chapters. She spent six years as Vice President for the Fox Valley Chapter in Illinois and is the current Past President of the Northern California AOSA Chapter.
Kris Olson
April 26, 2025
9:00am-1:00pm
Oak Knoll School
The Moving Classroom
In this workshop, we’ll discover ways to strengthen musical skills and create avenues for creativity and growth by getting children moving. For our youngest students we’ll explore age-appropriate activities that utilize adapted folk dance, fanciful finger plays, and the world of pretend. For our older students, we’ll explore how limiting choices and developing clear structures can benefit the creative process. Most importantly we’ll experience the beautiful connection of music to movement and the vitality it can add to our teaching.
About Kris
Kris Olson has taught music and movement for over 35 years. Before moving to Texas, Kris taught in public, private, rural, and urban elementary schools across Minnesota. Currently, Kris teaches as a private contractor in Lubbock, Texas with a focus in early childhood and family-based music and dance. She offers after school classes for elementary students that integrate bucket drumming, body percussion, and singing and she leads the children’s Border Morris team, Coyote Morris. Kris adjuncts in dance at Texas Tech University and teaches workshops and summer classes at various universities. She has her master’s degree in Orff Schulwerk from the University of St. Thomas. While living in Minneapolis, Kris studied dance at Zenon Dance Company and was a founding member of Schulfunk, an Orff based performance group that combined song, dance, and percussion. Her current musical hobbies include playing doumbek in Texas Tech’s Balkan ensemble and improving her skills on her covid instrument, the bodhrán.