Submitted by Marcy Cochran, Loveland, Colorado
Idea posted November 15, 2002
Last spring, my school did an all-school performance in the park at an outdoor amphitheater. With all the turmoil of Sept. 11, we chose "Lighten Up" as our theme for our program and used many of the ideas and songs in the Music K-8 magazines. We didn't want to forget about the sadness of the Sept. event though, so as a closing song we sang "You Are Our Heroes" (from Music K-8, Vol. 12, No. 4). This was also appropriate since our principal was leaving our school at the close of the school year.
We have 13 classrooms in our school, grades 5 through kindergarten. Each class formed a "human stripe" in the flag. We had one huge human flag! What gave the flag the color was that each child held a red, white, or blue balloon. It took some graphing out to see which classes and which kids held which color to make it work, but it was worth it. The party store in our town even had blue balloons with stars on them, so that was even better!