Good Thinking

Every year we publish an entire all-school musical revue within the first few issues of Music K-8 Magazine. It's a revue that you can perform with all of your students or just one or more select classes, as you prefer. In this first issue (September/October 2020), you will find the first two songs of this year's revue. More music, script, teacher's guide, and other extras will be found in the third issue this year (January/February 2021).

This year, our revue is called Good Thinking. We felt compelled to focus on the one thing we have control over in a world with so seemingly little control: our own minds. There is a lot to deal with these days, and it's easy to get upset, angry, fearful, and even depressed. We are all human and bound to feel such things, and that's actually okay sometimes as long as it doesn't consume us, and we can find a balance with it. And that's where learning to change our thoughts can help. As we have written about many times before, the thoughts we think and the words we speak can have a profound impact on our lives. We're hoping that inviting kids to sing about their choices can help them learn this all-important life lesson.

As always, we encourage you to adapt the revue any way you like, such as modifying the script or adding more music. If you're interested, we have quite a number of previously published songs from Music K-8 you might consider, depending on the angle of your presentation. You can find lots of ideas and inspiration through our latest Index, covering Volumes 1-30 of the magazine, at MusicK8.com/Index There you can browse through our Interactive Index Flipbook, download our Interactive Index, or do a search in our Magazine Index Search.

The opening song, "Good Thinking," shares its name with the revue to set the tone for what follows. The lyrics help us remember some key "good" things like manners and habits. But the overall message is that "Thinking well is good thinking." Use this as an opportunity to talk with your students about the impact of good thinking such as decency, kindness, compassion, respect, and other attributes of good character.

The style of the song is energetic and upbeat with a distinctive happy show tune flavor. The instrumental orchestral background on the Performance/ Accompaniment recording helps to keep it light and positive. The vocal lines are also instrumentally covered to help reinforce young voices. This is especially handy if you are not planning to use the optional part 2.

On our recording, we chose to use two soloists for the beginning section, one younger and one older (Emery Allen and Melissa Schott). This is optional, and you may choose to use just one soloist or all of your singers here. Going into the chorus at measure 25, you will see that we suggest adding part 2 here. Again, it is optional, but it adds nicely to the build of the piece if you can pull it off. As always, if you need a little help with the second part, we suggest including others such as older students, teachers, or even parents. To help you teach part 2, we have created a rehearsal track which you will find on our web site for free downloading.

Since the solos and the second part are optional, we have also created a full version of the song that does not include either of those things in case that works better for you. You will find this unison version on the recording for this issue (track 28).