Summer 1 - Forgiveness
Assembly Plan
Forgiveness
We thought about a word we use a lot - perhaps every day and how sometimes it can feel like a very hard word to say. It’s a word we use when we’ve done something wrong and we want to make things better again and the word is ‘sorry’.
We thought about the last time we said sorry to someone and why.
We read ‘Jonah and the Whale’ from the Bible and talked about how Jonah found it hard to say sorry to God at the start. We agreed that saying sorry isn’t always easy, but that it’s important when we’ve done something wrong that we understand that it a first step to making things better again. Also that it doesn’t mean that the other person has to forgive us there and then and perhaps we’ll have to do other things as well so show we’re truly sorry. We thought that saying ‘I’m sorry’ is a great first step to making things better again and that we like to forgive people who say sorry to us.
Stories about forgiveness
Composer of the half term - Georges Bizet
Bizet was a French composer and pianist who, after studying at the Paris Conservatoire, found it difficult to be taken seriously as an opera composer. His early works were mostly ignored and he made money by arranging music for other composers. In 1875, obsessed by all things Spanish, he wrote 'Carmen', a light opera with a serious ending about a beautiful girl who works in a factory.
Bizet came from a very musical family – his father was a composer and his mother was a pianist – and his own musical talents were obvious from an early age. In fact, he was such a talented child that he was allowed to study at the Paris Conservatoire (music college) when he was just nine years old! Bizet's work remained individual throughout his career - he went on to write operas, symphonies and other orchestral pieces.
Bizet finished his most famous and most popular piece of work, the opera 'Carmen', in 1874. The 'Habanera' from Act I and the 'Toreador Song' from Act II of 'Carmen' are now two of the best known of all operatic arias. That's a pretty big achievement for an opera that Bizet originally predicted would be "a definite and hopeless flop". As it turned out, he couldn't have been more wrong. The bold drama of the storyline and punchiness of Bizet's melodies have made it a lasting favourite with audiences. Its powerful story of love, betrayal and revenge continues to capture imaginations the world over, almost 150 years on.