Working on a musical is exciting for students, teachers, and the entire middle school community! As the first musical theater book especially for middle school productions, The Magic of Middle School Musicals provides a step-by-step guide for success. Bobetsky approaches planning and producing musicals in the context of a curricular unit of study and includes strategies for assessing student learning. Dr. Victor V. Bobetsky, a former New York City middle school music teacher, begins with advice on how to select a musical, obtain copyright permission, and arrange the music for middle school voices. He discusses strategies for teaching the music in the choral classroom, auditioning, casting, and rehearsal procedures. Practical suggestions show directors how to work with student actors, create choreography, and manage scenery, set design, costumes, lighting, and more. The Magic of Middle School Musicals gives music teachers the information and confidence they need to artistically adapt musicals from the American repertoire to the middle school level so that teachers, students, and audiences can experience and enjoy this unique, familiar, and musically expressive genre!

Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle School General Music presents numerous ways to engage adolescents in active music making that is relevant to their lives so that they may be more apt to continue their involvement with music as a lifetime endeavor.

This is an essential text on an important area of the music curriculum consistently judged weak or inadequate by school inspectors in Britain. It covers social, physiological, musical, and pedagogical aspects of young adolescent singing, with focus on Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14) and the progression from primary school. Grounded in extensive research and authoritatively written, it uses case studies to illustrate best practice, and introduces the principles of cambiata, a dedicated approach to the adolescent voice. Other chapters contain practical and proven advice on repertoire, technique, and the motivation of reluctant singers, boosting the confidence of teachers for whom choral work is not the main specialism.

Bringing together scholars from musicology, literature, childhood studies, and theater, this volume examines the ways in which children's musicals tap into adult nostalgia for childhood while appealing to the needs and consumer potential of the child. The contributors take up a wide range of musicals, including works inspired by the books of children's authors such as Roald Dahl, P.L. Travers, and Francis Hodgson Burnett; created by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lionel Bart, and other leading lights of musical theater; or conceived for a cast made up entirely of children. The collection examines musicals that propagate or complicate normative attitudes regarding what childhood is or should be. It also considers the child performer in movie musicals as well as in professional and amateur stage musicals. This far-ranging collection highlights the special place that musical theater occupies in the imaginations and lives of children as well as adults. The collection comes at a time of increased importance of musical theater in the lives of children and young adults.

A Study Guide for Howard Ashman's "Little Shop of Horrors", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.

A valuable, one-stop guide to collection development and finding ideal subject-specific activities and projects for children and teens. For busy librarians and educators, finding instructions for projects, activities, sports, and games that children and teens will find interesting is a constant challenge. This guide is a time-saving, one-stop resource for locating this type of information—one that also serves as a valuable collection development tool that identifies the best among thousands of choices, and can be used for program planning, reference and readers' advisory, and curriculum support. Build It, Make It, Do It, Play It! identifies hundreds of books that provide step-by-step instructions for creating arts and crafts, building objects, finding ways to help the disadvantaged, or engaging in other activities ranging from gardening to playing games and sports. Organized by broad subject areas—arts and crafts, recreation and sports (including indoor activities and games), and so forth—the entries are further logically organized by specific subject, ensuring quick and easy use.

Based on interviews with real students, this inventive musical delves into the shifting perspectives middle schoolers have regarding their families, school, growing pains, and what it really feels like to be caught in that strange age between childhood and adulthood. Designed for actors in middle school to perform with their own rock band, Life in the Middle offers young and old audiences alike an inspiring glimpse into the lives of some extraordinary kids and reminds those in middle school today that they are not alone.