(03/29/2024) During the school day on March 28, the Anoka-Hennepin Eighth Grade Choir Festival allowed students from all six district middle schools to sing, learn and listen together at Anoka Middle School for the Arts. 

Around 250 students were in attendance and participated in a workshop session where they rehearsed with guest clinician Amy Johnson, the choir teacher at Coon Rapids High School, to sing two songs together, I Dream a World and Give us Hope. After performing two songs as a collective, each school had the opportunity to perform a song in front of their peers. View photos from the Eighth Grade Choir Festival.

“Everyone came prepared so we got to work on the extra musical stuff that makes singing really fun,” Johnson said. “To have an elevated choral experience of singing with 300 singers shows them what could be next and that they live in a world of possibility.”
 
Organized by the middle school choir teachers, the goal of the festival is to build a sense of why singing is important and how singing in a choir is beneficial to students.

“The opportunity to listen to singers from other schools and hear they are working on the same things is really beneficial,” Johnson said. “To hear that their peers are doing that work is such a huge boom to their confidence and to their belief that they’re capable – which is the primary driver of success for a developing voice.”