First day: expectations, adaptations

After nearly a year of reading, planning, meetings, drafting, budgeting, and more planning, we headed up our first session of Wishing Well at CHSC today.

We had been to the center, in a building that catches you by surprise at the end of Niagara Street in South Oakland, several times before. We'd gone with Lynne to meet with Jessi Marsh, the director for the after school program that we're working with, twice last semester. Patrick and I also went once on our own to observe the program and meet some of the kids who we would be teaching. In our first week back at Pitt, we went in one last time, the two of us, so that Jessi could give us an informal "orientation," the type that volunteers at CHSC usually get.

We also did lots of paper planning on our own. Overall, I doubt that we could have been more prepared than we were. But I think we were both a little taken aback with how things went.

Our plan for the day was as follows:

1. Play "Fruit Bowl" and a name game
2. Go over our list of rules (Patrick and I had created characters to "perform" the rules with)
3. Introduce the Word of the Day, audience
4. Play "Zoom!"
5. Play "Object Relay," if there was time
6. Discuss theatre: who's seen a play before? What do you remember? What is a character?
7. Discuss our goals for the next eight weeks, using Christina (as a cowgirl) to illustrate them
8. Play a final game or two ("Object Relay," "Explosion Tag," "Quick Numbers")

Pretty ambitious for an hour and a quarter with fifteen 5 to 8-year-olds, but we figured that it's better to plan too much than not enough, and we had things that we could cut.

Here's how it actually went down:

1. Jessi introduced us (Mister Patrick and Miss Cory!) and we played "Fruit Bowl." It's a rowdy game. The kids loved it, but they got really excited. They were pushing one another and falling over, and nothing we or the CHSC staff who stayed in the room said helped them to calm down. We tried to move on to the name game, but we started with Donald and Victor, who are the youngest by far and the least able to cope with new ideas/instructions (as Jessi later told us). Donald didn't quite understand the game, and the other kids got frustrated. Everyone was too embarrassed to do an action with their name when we got to them, and everyone was still riled up from the previous game. The name game was not a success.

2. We started with the rules. Quiet Coyote was a rule that made sense to them, but most of the other ones probably went in one ear and out the other. After the second rule or so I started asking for volunteers to read the rule aloud, which they liked. We had written them down on pieces of paper, and the kids wanted to come up and hold the paper, so Patrick started to invite them up. Everyone was talking, volunteering, and jumping up and down; we'd get them calm one second and they'd be up and bouncing around the next. Quiet Coyote seemed to stick, though.

3. The Word of the Day was a pretty good idea. The word was "audience" and seemed an appropriate pick; Chloe was possibly the only one who could sound it out on paper. We came up with a definition as a group. (Kids shouted things like "People!" and "People who watch!") We segued this into telling them that they needed to be a good audience, especially if we were playing a game that not everybody was playing at the same time. I tried to reference the WD throughout the rest of the time with them.

4. We moved on to "Zoom!" -- a game that, it turns out, is probably a bit beyond them. There's a lot of complicated words and actions to remember, and it involves focus/concentration, which they just don't have enough of yet. Now that I think about it, the first time I played "Zip-Zap-Zop" was in second grade, and that seemed about the youngest age possible. Most of these kids are a year or two younger than that. Nobody really "got" the game, and it turned into a contest between a couple of the older boys (I remember Milik was one) and three of the girls. The older ones liked it to some degree, I think, but some of the kids just couldn't play.

5. No time for "Object Relay."

6. We talked about theatre. They were wound up still, but sitting them down and having them raise their hands helped to calm things. Some of them had seen plays (most of them couldn't remember the names of the plays). The majority were Christmas plays -- they sounded more like pageants, actually. Somebody said The Nutcracker. This discussion is something that I think went relatively well. The segue into talking about characters was natural; when I asked the kids what they remembered about watching a play, and what happens in a play, they quickly brought up that they watched "people walking around." So we talked about whether those people were behaving like themselves or somebody else (the latter, we decided), and how you can pretend to be somebody else. I demonstrated some different kinds of walks. I asked the kids if acting sounded like fun; some said "yes," some yelled "boring!" Hopefully we'll get past that last response.

7. Patrick, meanwhile, was outside with Christina helping her change. He brought her in as Daisy the cowgirl. Some of the kids acted skeptical ("You're Christina!" "You're not a real cowgirl"), but they all seemed to enjoy asking her questions. When at the end she pulled off her bandana and hat, they seemed satisfied. This was, I think, another success, and a good way to show them a little bit of what we'll do with them.

8. We closed with "Object Relay." Except Patrick forgot how to play, and it turned into "Slow-Motion Race." That's probably for the best, because the actual game would have been too advanced. We realized (obviously) that we need to re-evaluate some of the games we've been thinking of playing with these kids -- but that's to be expected. This game, again, didn't go too well. The kids like to compete, but when it's all about the competition, I think they lose track of the game itself. Some of them will try to cheat and do anything to win. Milik had quite a problem with this in SMR. He kept doubling back and the game went on so long that we had to quit in the middle and call a tie so that they could go to dinner.

We were a bit discouraged at the end of the day. Jessi brought us into her office for some debriefing, and I felt cheered after talking with her. We told her that things hadn't gone completely as expected, the kids had been rowdier than we thought they'd be, some of the games weren't at the right level though others were, etc. -- she told us that part of that rowdiness was probably because it's the first day and they're not used to us yet. Other pieces of advice she gave us:

--We'll figure out as we go along which kids are better able to set examples of how a game is supposed to work. Starting the name game with Donald and Victor was a faux pas that we would never have committed had it not been the first day.
--They're used to things being very structured in that classroom. If that structure is removed, they'll probably be kind of rowdy, at least at first.
--The games she saw us playing with them (Fruit Bowl and the name game) were, she thought, very age-appropriate.

All in all, I left feeling as if my brain had exploded a little bit. But first days are always about learning and adapting, and I think we're making a good start.