Fairytales

The end of the day today marked the half-way point of the program. Over the next four weeks, we plan to start attacking the final performance. So today was sort of a trial run to see if our revised idea for the performance had any likelihood of working.

What we decided to do was something that Patrick and I both felt was sort of risky, in that it could either work very well or crash-and-burn -- but it probably wouldn't end up somewhere in between. We had decided to split the kids into two groups and have each group perform a fairytale for the other. The group that was watching would have to guess which fairytale it was after it was over. I picked Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Patrick had The Three Little Pigs.

Our concerns going in included:

--Kids would probably not be OK with playing a character of opposite gender. (Hence the animal-centric tales.)
--Kids would simply not want to participate.
--Kids would feel awkward.
--Kids wouldn't be able to rehearse and then present something relatively consistent.

But we knew that if this didn't work out at all, we would likely have to rethink our final performance idea again.

We spent a few minutes reviewing what we had talked about on the first day (characters) and added to that: can characters be things other than people? How do characters help tell a story? Then we split into groups.

There are often kids going in and out, more lately than before, because of tutoring, etc., so it took my group a minute to get settled. When we did I asked who knew the Goldilocks story, and Chloe, not surprisingly, recited the whole thing to the group (with a little encouragement), doing voices and everything. They were relatively attentive with some coaxing. Zach was initially resistant to the idea of a fairytale, but when I said we were going to act it out, he got excited. After Chloe was finished we had the issue of casting.

Donald wanted to be the Big Bear. Humorous, because he's definitely the smallest. No contention there.

Chloe and Zach both wanted to be the Baby Bear.

Andreas and Jose both volunteered right away for Goldilocks. I was floored. No teasing, even, about how Goldilocks is a girl. But Jose wasn't as gung-ho as Andreas, so Andreas ended up as Goldilocks.

After a few rounds of of "No I wanna be..." we settled on Chloe as Baby Bear, Zach as Medium Bear, and Donald as Big Bear. Andreas was Goldilocks. Jose was disconnected until I asked him to be the storyteller, which he did a relatively good job with. I almost got Aochen to participate; I was oh-so-close, he even actually expressed interest in being a chair, but then the interest waned as fast as it had flared up. He is the constant loner, the most difficult to engage.

We rehearsed a few times and then performed for Patrick's group. They were engaged in the story; Andreas was hamming up Goldilocks, Chloe was doing a squeaky Baby Bear voice, everyone remembered their parts quite well (probably because they were all already very familiar with the story). The Bears all had fun being bears. Patrick's group went, giving a great example of non-living characters: the houses that the wolf blew down were made of kids holding hands, and the wolf was at times played by more than one kid, holding mini scripts to remember their lines ("Little pig, little pig, let me come in!/Then I'll huff and I'll puff...").

After our mini plays, we sat and talked about them. The kids came up with the following ideas:

--Both stories had "trouble" (i.e. conflict) in them
--The characters had to fix the trouble in each story
--Andreas played a girl, and Christina and Korea played boys (pigs), but that was OK

Overall, they seemed to really enjoy the activity. When we told them that this was the kind of thing we would be doing for their parents/friends at the final performance, there was some excitement, and at the least definite overall openness to the idea. They were very excited at the mention of making props/costumes for their characters.

We let them pick a game to play for the last 15 minutes or so, since they'd done so well at the storytelling activity. So we closed the day with "I Spy."

This weekend we have the work of picking a storybook that will work for their final performance so that they can pick characters and start creating them.