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Thirteen students gathered in Morgan Van Holland’s elementary music classroom last week for a bucket drumming class through Luverne Community Education.
“(Director) Lisa Nath approached me with the idea of bucket drumming,” Van Holland said. “She noticed that there was a group in Sioux Falls and realized we have not done anything like that in our community.”
The third- through fifth-grade students will conclude the class with a public performance at Luverne’s Hot Dog Night.
The 15-minute performance will be at 6:45 p.m. Thursday, July 14, prior to the wiener dog races.
At the first one-hour class, Van Holland, who began teaching at Luverne Elementary in 2019, introduced students to basic percussion techniques and the parts of the five-gallon bucket that can be hit.
Subsequent classes taught students how to read music for bucket drumming.
“We thought offering a bucket drumming course would be popular with students because it was something different,” she said.
“The last three years that I have been here we have not used buckets in the music room, and this was something different for the students to learn.”
The July 14 performance will also help students learn.
“Students feel pride after working really hard on a piece of music and performing in front of an audience. They also gain a level of experience of how to handle emotions during a performance,” Van Holland said.
She admits that even professionals feel nervous and have a level of anxiety before performing.
“The more they perform, the more skills and confidence they build from the performance,” Van Holland said.