At Moffat County School District, we love music. We love all the arts, and we celebrate our students’ opportunities to learn, embrace and perform them.

The Christmas season is one of music. Whether you celebrate the sacred or joy in the jolly or both, it’s a time of light and life and familiar melodies sung again. And in the schools, it’s a time for concerts.

Elementary students, middle schoolers and high schoolers are performing this month for their families, their classmates and the community. Festive tunes, traditional hymns, classical carols and more will be sung and played all month long in performances prepared for since it was much, much warmer.

There’s not much better than hearing children sing. While these experiences are sometimes stressful for kids, it’s a great opportunity for them to learn and grow in ways that are hard to duplicate. How much more confident are our students standing up to present or meet new people or galvanize or lead when they’ve learned to do it since kindergarten? Not to mention the benefit of the music itself!

We’ve discussed in this space before the benefit of music education for young people. Both impactful on their other studies and for its own sake, learning music is a multifaceted, irreplicable function of a complete education. And the performance of music is part of what makes it music!

In the education world, we love a good assessment. There’s no better assessment than the final performance. Not for how well you know this or that song, but for how well you’ve learned to prepare, to practice, and to perfect. If your performance goes well, you know your process is working. If it goes poorly, that’s okay! Time to get back in the lab. We encourage our students to take these musical endeavors seriously and to assess themselves and have a growth mindset about their effort in music class the same as they should in math or English.

But most of all, music brings us together. In the case of the school concert, it literally brings the community in from the cold to listen to the children sing the songs of their people. There’s not much better than that.

So, we’ll see you in the auditoriums this Christmas season, where sleigh bells ring and children sing, and all is merry and bright.