Preschool Christmas Parties - Information Page

🎶 The performance itself 

Here’s a YouTube link to a playlist with a few songs that are likely to be included in our performance. Feel free to play this on repeat for your Centre’s tamariki, before and after our visit.

The performance will be 40-minutes long. We will perform our “Christmas Faves” bilingual music set. If you have a particular waiata of ours that you’d like us to incorporate in the set, then please let us know, and we will do our best to add it in but can’t guarantee it as some of our waiata work better as part of a small group setting rather than in an event performance.

We will have the tamariki up and moving about. There will be plenty of repetition to help them learn any new kupu/words and some call-and-response waiata, so a good combo of different styles to keep them engaged throughout. We will then finish with a bubble song!

ALSO, we can sing in Santa Claus, or Mrs Claus, if they are a part of your party, if you would like. If this is the case, we will sing “Santa Claus is coming to town”, AFTER our bubble song, and will get tamariki to listen out for his sleigh bells or “Ho, ho, ho”.

With our props songs, can we please have kaiako help to hand them to tamariki in the back. We can cover those sitting near the front, but to avoid standing on little toes/fingers, we do our best to not walk over/through them, especially if they’re seated, if we can help it – thank you, in advance!

🎤 An allocated performance space

If you’re able to please allocate a performance space for us, we’ll set up our speaker and props when we arrive, which we aim to do 20-30 minutes before our start time, and will stand to perform, so won’t need any chairs.

A couple of points to consider for a performance space:

• If you are including a visit from Santa Claus or Mrs Claus in your celebrations (and they are giving out presents once they arrive), we’ve found that setting them up in an area away from where we performed helps to make our exit more seamless (and you won’t have us packing up in the background in the photos! haha!).
• We love to have a cleared space in front of us for tamariki to come up and have a kanikani with us if they’d like to (a Preschoolers mosh-pit of sorts! 😆🥳 ), if the space allows.
• We usually have two portable trolleys that we take around with us that carry all our gear, so having a performance space that enables us to wheel them in easy enough would be great. However, we do understand that this may not always be the case and will figure out a way through! And no doubt there’ll be very helpful kaiako/kaimahi around to help us out with a trolley-lift, if needed.

🪇 Props – shakers/jingle bells and rainbow ribbon props

We love to include a shaker/jingle bell song and a rainbow ribbon prop song. Are you able to please supply enough of each for the number of tamariki that will be present for our visit? 

Shakers can be made by popping small toys or blocks into a plastic container or bottle, or there are a number of DIY ideas available on Pinterest or YouTube. It’s been quite fun for us checking out how creative Centres have gotten with this!

With the rainbow ribbon props, the most ideal would be ones that have six of the rainbow colours that are in our “Colourful Kiwi Christmas” waiata (see YouTube link, above). Here is a video that we made during lockdown that shows how you can use materials that you may already have on hand, to make your own, and it also shows the triangular, ice-cream lid, rainbow ribbon props that we made for ourselves.

Ideally, there will be enough for one of each, per child. Please let us know if you don’t quite have enough and we can bring along extras to top-up your supply. Some Centres have borrowed from other Centres, also, so that can be option, too.

Unfortunately, we are unable to fully supply for each session as we won’t have time to clean these between each visit, and, of course, if you’re just not able to supply anything, we can adjust our music set to not include the use of props. Please do let us know if this is the case so we have time to make the necessary change – thank you!  🙂

⏰ Timeliness

We endeavour to arrive about 20-30 minutes prior to our starting time.

If we have a full schedule, we are confident that we’re able to get to each Centre/venue on time. However, there is always the possibly that we hit delays, in which case, we will endeavour to contact you to let you know (as soon as possible) that we’re running late, so, thank you in advance for your understanding.

Also, if it is a full schedule, and depending on what you have planned for our party, we sometimes invite tamariki up for a stamp on their hand, which we find is a lovely quick way to meet and greet them all, individually, and is usually one of the many highlights of our performances!  ❤️ However, kei te pai and totally fine if that can’t be added in.

After our performance we pack up quite quickly and head off to our next party!

🅿️ Parking spot

If it’s not too much trouble, it would really help us out to have a carpark allocated for us, near the entrance/area where your event will be, please. This will definitely contribute to a smoother transition between each visit, if we have a full schedule.

📖 Ordering our books!

If you are not already aware, we have a 5-book ‘Rainbow Collection’ of bilingual children’s pukapuka (click on this link for more info about them), based on five of our original waiata, so tamariki can sing along while checking out the illustrations. Our books are printed here in Ōtautahi/Christchurch and were created by a mostly Ōtautahi-based team of wāhine (our graphic designer is Auckland-based, but we don’t hold that against her! haha!).

If anybody is interested in purchasing any, we would love to offer them to you at a discounted $20 per book (normally $22). Just click on THIS LINK to head to an order form that you can fill out and email back to us and we can either send it out to you, for $7 postage, or bring your order with us, on the day.

🧾 Invoicing

I’ll send through an invoice, via Xero (if I haven’t already done so).

If you decide to order any of our books and would like them added to the invoice, please let me know and I can make that adjustment and then resend the invoice. I can also add a purchase order number, if you have one that needs to be included on the invoice.

The standard fee for a Christmas party is $250 (no gst included, as we are not currently gst-registered). This is for a Christmas party that is held on a week day, before 2pm*. This is a super-reduced (almost 50% off), “locals-discounted” fee that we only offer to Ōtautahi-based Centres, and the reason there’s a bit of a jump up between this fee and hiring us for an event!

* evening, weekend and travel fees apply, where relevant.

📸 Photos, videos and social media

You are welcome to take photos and video footage of us performing, during the session, or a group photo afterward. We are happy for you to tag us in any social media posts, also [FB: @LoopyTunesPreschoolMusic and IG: @loopytuneskidsmusic ].

We will always ask permission before posting or re-posting on our own social media pages, if tamariki are in any of the photos.

Also, we like to take a selfie of ourselves and the Centre’s sign as we leave so will tag you in this post at the end of the day.  😊

🗣 Feedback

We would LOVE any feedback from you about our visit, so we try to flick through a wee survey a week or two after our visit (just a heads up!).  👍