Generational Voices come together!

Hello! I am currently in my 3rd year teaching music at St-Willibrord Elementary School. I have a choir of 30 gr.5-6 students. We are currently working on our Christmas project-singing at the senior citizens home about 5 minutes from our school. I thought we could take our idea further, and have them come do a field trip at our school. This is a partnership that will happen with another school, Centennial Park School. We would sing songs from their time. We will be interviewing some of folks to know what they like to listen to. Ideally, we would like to end with a tea and cookie time, where the students could build relationships with some of the seniors. They would then come back to school and write about their experience. This could be an ongoing project with the teachers as well( letter writing perhaps...).

Update (June 27, 2014)

Intergenerational Project
The Idea
Over Christmas, I brought my choir to a senior home to sing Christmas carols. The students and I discussed after, and our experience was wonderful, but we did not have enough interaction with the seniors. We decided that it would be a good idea to do something more interactive.

Getting Started
The students thought it would be a good idea to put on a show about music that the seniors used to listen to. We decided the best way to do this was to interview the seniors about their music influences. We discussed what good interview questions were and what they looked like. Each student was paired into teams of two and each student had to come up with five good interview questions over the weekend. At our next coir practice the following week we reviewed tese questions and made some changes. With parental and teacher permission we embarked on our journey one afternoon to interview the seniors. The interviews between the student and seniors were very insightful. In fact they turned into a lot of fun when the seniors, hoping to jog the students memories, began singing their favourite songs!
Another teacher form another elementary school loved the idea so much that she asked to be part of the project as well. I said great and she interviewed seniors at a home near their school.
After the interviews the students and I tabulated all of the different songs. We then took a vote and chose 5 different songs that we would sing for the seniors.
Challenges
We only received about 20 seniors on the day of the show. The reason being that I relied on the woman at he senior home to promote the show as she had doine in the past with the christimas show. Howeve r she was on holiday and the seniors were unaware of the show.
Because of this we did not have the turnout that we wanted. However, because the CLC grant had paid for a bus, we did not leave the bus unused! Instead, we as a choir rode to the senior home and performed there instead. We knocked on some doors, and many of the seniors upon hearing their favourite tunes came out to watch us!
In the future if I were to do this again I would not rely on the lady at the senior home but I would be in charge of all of the logistic in terms of planning and promoting the project.
Final outcome
The students really enjoyed the project as the songs they had learned were different from those they hear on the radio. Although this proved to be challenging it also allowed them to learn a new music genre and expand their musical knowledge. This was only possible due to CLC and Imagine Action who made this intergenerational project possible.