Casting!

To make sure that the kids all had the story of Strega Nona in their heads, we broke it down into beginning, middle, and end, and had everyone agree on the events that happened in each section. Then, in three groups (originally), we chose "something that happened" in the section of the story assigned to a group, and made a frozen picture that showed that chosen "something."

We were worried about this exercise, but the kids took to it fairly well. They had to guess what the thing that was happening in each frozen picture was. They were inventive. We had a group that showed the final picture in the story, for instance: Big Anthony with a giant belly full of pasta...Andreas sat with his arms in a circle in front of him, representing his big belly, and Victor and Donald stood inside, the pasta in the belly. And the kids guessed it, too.

One of the tricky things is that America Reads is volunteering at CHSC on the same days that we are, and so they're always taking kids out to tutor them one-on-one. What with already patchy attendance, this means we rarely have all of the kids in the room at once. Kids come back mid-exercise, and we have to reintegrate them. For frozen pictures we ended up, therefore, with a fourth group, which worked out okay.

We then moved to casting: another thing we were worried about. Would it be a madhouse? It turned out -- no. We worked together to make a list of all of the characters in the story, and came up with a pretty lengthy one, with some surprising additions -- i.e.:

Strega Nona
Goat
Blue bird
Big Anthony
Dinner
The town's king
Magic
Three little kisses
Pasta pot
Moon and stars
Rabbit

...and so on. Moreover, though we did end up with three Strega Nonas, there was no fighting over roles. We ended up with a lot of variety and some of the first ones chosen were some of the least glorious. Little kids don't even need the phrase "no small roles, only small actors."

Some of the kids (Aochen, Jose, Ivan, Maru), the ones who have been constantly hard to engage, didn't pick roles. Maybe they'll get interested in participating once we start making costumes. At this point, Patrick and I really don't know how to get them involved when they just don't want to be.

We passed out paper and markers and had the kids draw their characters, letting them know that we would be making costumes and that this would be preparation. At the end, we invited kids to show their pictures, if they wanted to -- a few did.