Field trip losses

Today we arrived to find, without warning, that most of the kids had gone on a field trip to SportsWorks (or been picked up early). So we had about six kids to work with.

We didn't attempt to do costumes. We started out with Human Machine, which they really seemed to enjoy and get the hang of well. We used that to springboard into a type of "character machine," having the kids pick a sound/word/sentence that their characters would make, and a movement, and having them build the town out of it. This morphed into a kind of game of make-believe. We paused to (re)name the characters as the kids desired. (One of the Strega Nonas became "Young Money," for example.) They wanted to keep playing the make-believe game, so we modified it: one of the things Strega Nona does in the book is help the townspeople when they have problems/complaints, so we had the kids come up with a problem their character might have. They then went to the Stregas with their problems and the Stregas figured out how to fix them.