Orchestra classroom: Introducing......My theme for the 2014-15 school year

Every year in orchestra, I like to have a theme to help me design t-shirts and also to help motivate my students to be their best.  Last year, I used the musical tree (see poster) on my t-shirts and I frequently talked to my students about the effort required to nurture their talents in order for them to improve and grow.  We even had an orchestra plant in our classroom that I watered when enough students practiced so students could watch our plant thrive with our diligence.

This year, I decided to use this as my slogan:  Orchestra Gives You Wings

I like to design my t-shirts on www.CustomInk.com.   It is probably cheaper to use a local shop, but I like the design feature on customink.com and they have been great to work with.  Plus, it's nice to not have to create everything from scratch in Adobe Photoshop.  CustomInk has a lot of clip art available when designing a shirt, so I was able to piece all of this together using their graphics.  Here's what I came up with:

Here's what I'm most excited about:  My plan is to have students earn their own wings to pin on their shirts.  I found little plastic aviator-type wings that I can customize for music.  Students will earn their wings after earning a pre-determined percentage on all of their playing tests.  This is manageable for every student because I allow students to re-take playing tests as many time as they need.  I am also going to try a new policy where I require students to re-take a playing test if they don't reach a certain score.