British International School Friday’s Fall 2025 Music Club

The Day They Didn't Want to Go to Aftercare

British International School · Fall 2025 Overture Club

Lead Teacher: Abbey Atwater

Week Two: When One Student Cried

The curriculum changed. Games the kids loved suddenly got locked until they completed certain lessons.

Theo was devastated. He cried. A lot.

"Theo was really sad and even cried a lot at first," Peiran wrote, covering one of Abbey's sessions.

This is the moment teachers dread. A kid genuinely upset, the whole class energy shifting, everyone watching to see what happens next.

Peiran kept going. They worked through Rocket Race, identifying the difference between bassoon, clarinet, and oboe. She leaned on Incredibox as an alternative. She set boundaries while acknowledging the disappointment.

"But things ended up well!" she wrote.

By the end of class, Theo was back. Playing, learning, engaged.

A few weeks later: "They kept saying this is the best club ever, and they didn't even want to go to aftercare lol."

The kid who cried in week two ended up not wanting to leave.

Week Five: "I Don't Like Beat Decoders"

First day with Beat Decoders, a game where you identify and create rhythm patterns.

The kids' immediate reaction: "I don't like Beat Decoders."

Peiran could have moved on. Skipped to something easier. Let them play their favorites.

Instead, she showed them the second part—where they could arrange their own beats, create their own patterns.

Their attitude changed completely.

"From saying 'I don't like Beat Decoders' at the beginning to saying 'omg I did it!', 'listen to my beats!'" Peiran wrote. "They are all very obsessed at the end."

The classroom filled with "can you help me" sounds. But in a good way. Kids calling her over to show what they'd created, asking how to make it better, completely absorbed.

"By the end, they were all highly engaged and excited," she noted.

The game they rejected at first became the one they couldn't stop playing.

Week Eleven: The Genre Kahoot

Abbey was worried. Today's topic was genres—pop, rock, classical, jazz. Would they care?

She went through different genres throughout class, connecting them to games and activities. Then she pulled up a Kahoot she'd found on musical genres.

"Sort of hard—I don't even know some of the genres it had," Abbey admitted.

They had a great time anyway. Guessing, laughing, dancing between questions.

But the best part came from what Abbey noticed during free exploration time. Students kept asking how to earn more rewards, where to find new features, how to access their music collection.

"By the end, students were asking where different buttons were on the interface, trying to dig deeper into the system," she'd written earlier in the semester.

They weren't just playing games anymore. They wanted to understand how everything worked. They were curious about the mechanics behind the music.

What Actually Happened

Over fourteen weeks at British International School, kids went from crying about locked games to not wanting to leave class.

They went from "I don't like Beat Decoders" to "listen to my beats!"

They learned to identify the subtle differences between woodwind instruments. They composed their own rhythms. They explored musical genres through dancing and guessing games.

But here's what really changed: they stopped seeing music as something teachers make them do and started seeing it as something they could explore on their own terms.

Peiran watched it happen in real time during that Beat Decoders session: "Compared to Chrome Music Lab, they seemed more drawn to our games, which shows how engaging they are."

The tools mattered. But what mattered more was teachers like Abbey and Peiran who paid attention to what worked, pivoted when things didn't, and gave kids space to discover music for themselves.

Even when that meant dealing with tears, rejections, and kids getting "pretty goofy" while screaming into Flappy Muse to learn about dynamics.

By the end, they didn't want to go to aftercare. They wanted to stay and make more music.