A Peek Inside Our Under the Sea Music Showcase

This year was my first year doing spring performances! When I was planning my performances, I wanted them to be different from the Christmas Concert. I wanted them to give parents a glimpse of what our daily music class looks like. So, I programmed it differently from my traditional concert and called it a Spring Showcase! 

The traditional Christmas concert at my school features all the classes, from kindergarten to grade 5. The students come on the stage, sing their song, and wait in the classroom for the remainder of the concert. This was the first thing that I wanted to change when planning a Spring Showcase. I wanted the students to stay in the gym the entire time. That meant planning 2 concerts. One for Kindergarten to Grade 2 students and one for Grades 3-5 students.  

The Kindergarten to Grade 2 concerts were Under the Sea-themed, a definite hit with parents, students, and teaching staff alike.​

When planning the concert, I knew I wanted each individual class to have its own special song, each grade level to have a song, and whole-group songs. I also wanted to show examples of the things we do in every music class- singing, moving, and playing instruments. With those guidelines, here is what I came up with!

1. My Friends in the Sea: This song came from Music K-8 and was a great opener for our concert! I added some simple actions, and the whole group sang it together! 

2. Down at the Beach: This song also came from Music K-8 and was performed by the kindergarten students. I choreographed some simple actions to go along with it. 

3. Coral: I first heard of this song through my Level 1 Orff course. I wrote a short Orff arrangement for this song and had one of my grade 1/2 classes perform it. If you have heard this song before, it is quite short, like most folk songs, so we extended the form of the piece a bit 

• Sang the song with the piano 
• Sang the song with just the bass bordun
• Sang the song with the bordun and the clusters on metallophones 
• Sand the song with bordun, metallophone clusters, and added the cabasa 

In between, as each part was added, the bass instruments kept their steady bordun going.

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Get a copy of the Orff Arrangement here! ​

4. Scuba Man: This song is a part of Lynn Kleiner’s collection Songs of the Sea. I gave this to another one of my grade 1/2 classes, and they loved it! The song is a solo, but we first learned it as a group, and the students would echo-sing things that I thought I was finding in the ocean. Once they had some experience with that, I had them give me suggestions of things I might find as a scuba man, and again had them echo-sing to me. 

About 4 music classes before the concert, I asked each student whether they wanted a chance to solo, and all but 2 chose to. Each student came up with their own thing they found while scuba diving in the ocean. We had jellyfish, seaweed, sunken ships, books, sharks, you name it. For the performances, I printed their order and what they chose, and stuck it to the back of the music stand (the part they see) in case they forgot. We received tons of compliments on this song, and it was great to give students a chance to practice singing on their own!
5. How do you Talk like a Pirate: Another Music K8 song that was very easy to learn for our concert. It is to the tune of What do you say to a drunken sailor, and was a tune that got stuck in your head. All of my grade 1s and 2s performed this song, and we added in some actions to help them remember the words of the different verses. It was very powerful when sung by 80 kids!

6. Waves: This song was performed by another grade 1/2 class and comes from the Songs of the Sea book from Lynn Kleiner as well. For this song, we used glockenspiels and scarves. 

I split the class in half for the first part of the song: half got glockenspiels, and the other half got scarves. The lyrics of the song talk about the waves going up, down, in, out and all around. Depending on how their waves moved, we adjusted our scarves and glockenspiels accordingly. When the waves went up, scarves went up, and the glockenspiel played ascending glissandos! There is an instrumental section in the song where I had students switch parts, so everyone got to do both. 

This was one of the trickier songs to finesse and put together!

7. All the Fish: We went back to kindergarten, where we performed " All the Fish by Caspar Babypants, a song that had come across my Instagram feed in the summer. I added scarves to this song, but used only blue, green, and purple to give it an underwater feel. The movements we did were as follows 

• All the fish: “swin” scarf in front of you from side to side
• All the ducks paddle: hold each end of your scarf and pretend to paddle 
• Frogs jump: start your scarf on the ground and jump it up 
• Pigs are muddy: use the scarf as a cloth to “wash” off the mud 
• Kids are jumping: move the scarf in big arches, side to side 
• It is a free movement section 
• Hippos are napping: use your scarf as a pillow 
• All the fish: “swin” scarf in front of you from side to side

Luckily, I have a group of kindergarten students who watch me closely while I perform, so this was easy to pull off and impressive! 

8. Larry the Lobster: This song was the catalyst that started the planning of this Under the Sea concert. This song is another from Lynn Kleiner’s Songs of the Sea book, but I first heard it in my Orff Course, where we used it as a steady-beat activity. For this song, I also did an Orff arrangement, and Lynn gives some good suggestions for instruments to add in her resource. In the end, my instrumentation consisted of bass xylophones and metallophones, alto xylophones, claves, and cabasa.

9. Yellow Submarine: This likely ended up being my students' favourite song of the entire concert. I had all of my K-2s sing this song, and it was popular. However! It does have a lot of words, so we started learning it early- like in January for an April concert, so if you decide to do this song with younger students, give yourself some time! 

10. Under the Sea: I couldn’t do an under-the-sea concert without doing Under the Sea. But the Disney version is pretty fast and again has a lot of words for five, six, and seven-year-olds. So I found a version from Listen and Learn Music that still has the " Under the Sea " chorus, but switches out some of the verse and adds instruments, making it more accessible for my students! Take a listen below!

Listen and Learn Music’s Under the Sea Version

Script: I really strive to keep everything flowing smoothly at my concerts, and a script is one of the easiest ways to do that. At my Christmas Concerts, I rehearse a play with students, and for this showcase, I already had enough other moving parts that I didn’t want to also need to allocate time to practice and rehearse a script with students. Since the students were in the gym the entire time, the classroom teachers were there for the entire performance as well, so I had them read a script I wrote to connect the songs.

You can grab a copy of my sample script here! 

A tip for your script- don’t have the teacher introduce their own class. Not only is it awkward for them to talk about themselves in the 3rd person, but they also may need to put out fires before their class performance! 

Costumes and Decor
Full disclosure- costumes and decor are NOT my strong suit. So I keep it simple. For “costumes,” I simply asked that all students wear a blue, green, and purple t-shirt. To keep the decor simple, we set up an art show in the gym, which I think helped make it seem more like an arts showcase than another music concert. 

If you’re considering trying a showcase-style concert instead of a traditional performance, I highly recommend it. It does take planning and flexibility, but it also creates space for students to experience music in a more natural and connected way. This concert reminded me that performances do not have to be elaborate productions to be meaningful—they just need to reflect the joy of making music together.