Farmer’s Market and March with the Band

Ben’s parents drove back from the road trip on Friday night. I think it worked out really well – they were here the weekend before, then were gone for a few days on their Midwest adventure, then returned when Ben was done with work for the week and we could all be together again. We went to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning and picked up two baskets of fresh raspberries, two pumpkins, and a half bushel of honey crisp apples. YUM! Eli is REALLY excited about the pumpkins and keeps asking when we’re going to carve them :)

Later that morning, we headed over to the indoor practice field at Northwestern for a “March with the Band” activity. Kids were encouraged to bring their own instruments, so we brought a drum, Ben’s old clarinet (in Cheryl’s hand) and some maracas.

I think this was such a neat thing – the marching band did a presentation at the beginning, complete with the Northwestern fight song and some of the songs they play at football games. The band director was very engaging and fun with the crowd.

Northwestern’s band is all volunteer-based – none of them get scholarships for participating. I’m impressed a school with so few undergrads (8,500 undergrads and 8,000 graduate students) has this many in its marching band.

They taught the kids to do the Wildcat growl (complete with curling your fingers like a wildcat) -

They had a few points where they had all of the kids play their instruments at once (it was pretty noisy! The band director commented that there were a lot of future percussionists out there, probably because most people had shakers/maracas).

One fun thing that they did was introduce the various parts of the marching band, like the drum line. They showed the different types of drums and played them so we could hear the difference. And they had a song that went to the tune of, “These are the people in my neighborhood…” from Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street, my brain is forgetting which show, but they had a verse written about each instrument and they all sang it together – it was really cute.

See the cymbals on the right? They made them form the letter “N.”

Later, the kids went around to the various types of instruments and got to try them out, by sliding the trombone…

Banging on the drum…

Trying out the cymbal…

Or pushing the keys on the tuba…

Ben’s mom played with the clarinet group :)

And Eli even tried out the flags (though the flag girls told us the band director doesn’t let them have any boy flag people, which I thought was interesting).

At the very end, the band lined up and we all filled in between them. And then we marched with the band! It was so cute. But crazy fast. We could barely keep up with how fast they were going.

We were impressed with the activity. We were really glad it was held inside too, because it was a cold and rainy day outside as we left the building at the end. The kids in the band were all so sweet with the kids and everyone had a great time. There are other music-based kids activities through the university throughout the school year – you can check out the schedule here for more info.