Musical Futures Australia news and updates

 Schools down under are soon to close for the winter break but there lots of things to squeeze in over the next few weeks. You can find details of all Musical Futures Australia workshops as well as news, articles and more at http://www.musicalfuturesaustralia.org/

 Recharge workshops - We are holding two special workshops in Melbourne during late June. Recharge will bring back together around 75 teachers who took part in the early phase of the Musical Futures professional Learning program in Victoria.  These workshops give us the opportunity to see how they are going and to update them with the resources released since the were attending workshops and introduce some new resources for the first time.

 New resources -  The Recharge workshops give us the opportunity to road test  two new sets of Australian developed Musical Futures resources.  First up is Everyone Can Play, a pre-cursor to Just Play and designed for younger students - Grade 1 and 2’s in particular while MF Styles (it’s working title) are a series of genre based resources that incorporate some existing materials like Play-alongs and Grooves and adds new materials that will allow a complete exploration, including composition, improvisation and songwriting in a range of musical styles. At the Recharge workshops we will be road testing what we hope will be the final versions of Dancehall, Reggae and Funk.  

 Both the Everyone Can Play and MF Styles should be ready for release on Australia during late July.

 Who will be our 500th Victorian School?  In August 2015 Musical Futures commenced a Professional Development program for Victorian schools with funding from the Victorian Department of Education and Training.  Now approaching the halfway mark Musical Futures has been worked with over 600 teachers from 414 schools.  And recruitment has just started for the next cohort of schools to commence the program in August this year.  One school, somewhere in Victoria will become our 500th on our way to the targeted 800 schools over 4 years.

 Aussie MF teachers hit the US.  A group of 12 leading Australian Musical Futures teachers plus our good NZ friend and Champion teacher Hadley Ronayne from Long Bay College in Auckland are heading to the high Rockies in Colorado in July to be part of Little Kids Rockfest.  We will learn the latest from Little Kids Rock and share some of our new resources with them in return.  In addition to the four days at Rockfest we will have three days in Los Angeles.  This part of the tour will be a mix of cultural and music education as we take in and explore latin, urban and hip hop styles from local experts.

 Hoseah makes the final 12 in the Australian Voice.  The Voice, the TV talent show is about the sole survivor of the genre here in Australia and for the moment at least we are pleased it is.  If any readers have seen our video of the kids from Doveton College talking about Musical Futures they would have seen Hoseah Partsch introducing the chords to his song Memory Lane in our featured video.

Now two years later Hoseah is one of 12 finalists in The Voice and is being mentored by Boy George.  That has to be one very cool experience. Have a watch of him in action here.

 And in NZ.  Since our first ever Musical Futures workshop in Auckland in March this year we now have more than 50 New Zealand teachers using the Musical Futures resources and materials.