How to take part in Sunderland's Big Sing from home or school

Each year, Sunderland Music Hub invites children from primary schools across the city to gather at Sunderland Empire for its Big Sing event, with more than 1500 children taking part last year.

This year, due to lockdown, the event couldn’t go ahead in its original format, but schoolchildren will still be able to take part with a live stream via Facebook and YouTube.

This year’s event has a theme of ‘wellbeing’ or ‘feeling good’, so organisers felt it was more important than ever to still be able share the event with children and their families.

Children will be encouraged to unite through singing and the Big Sing Band will perform six songs about friendship, inner-strength and positivity.

Though the Big Sing band will be streamed into homes and schools, participants will not be on camera, so can let loose, sing and dance like no one's watching.

The event will take place on Monday, June 22 at 1pm via Sunderland Music Hub's Facebook and YouTube and everyone is welcome to tune in, whether that be at home or in school.

The team, who’ve been releasing weekly songs during lockdown, have created a series of six Learn to Sing videos and a Big Sing Toolkit including lyrics for each song and links to listen to them in advance of the event, which can be found at https://sunderlandmusichub.org.uk/project/bigsing2020/

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

In order for us to continue to provide high quality and trusted local news on this free-to-read site, I am asking you to also please purchase a copy of our newspaper.

Our journalists are highly trained and our content is independently regulated by IPSO to some of the most rigorous standards in the world. But being your eyes and ears comes at a price. So we need your support more than ever to buy our newspapers during this crisis.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our local valued advertisers - and consequently the advertising that we receive - we are more reliant than ever on you helping us to provide you with news and information by buying a copy of our newspaper.

Thank you.

How to subscribe to the print edition:

It’s easy to subscribe to your local newspaper. We have arranged a special 20 per cent off subscription offer for people to take advantage of. Visit www.localsubsplus.co.uk, choose the newspaper title, the type of subscription and enter your details.