Valentine's Day

Before heading in to CHSC today, Nick asked if we should bring some candy for the kids. You know, for Valentine's Day.

When we got started, it was immediately clear that the last thing the kids needed today was more candy. They'd been eating it all day and were still sucking away at lollipops, mouths sticky and rainbowed. They were a little, well, hyper.

We sang the Austrian song again, this time changing it so that the verses were cumulative. They remembered the song well from last week, and caught on quickly to the cumulative bit. They like coming up with new things to interrupt the yodel. I couldn't understand Victor's suggestion ("Surf's Up game!") even after he repeated it several times. How do you wade through the little-kid-mumble to get at meaning?

We then had the kids sit at their tables and gave each table a task: one had to listen for characters, one for places, and one for the trouble/solution. We also explained that we were reading these stories so that we could vote between them for something to base our final performance on. Nobody had read The Talking Eggs, the first book, before, although Chloe later said she has a version of it in Chinese, with different pictures.

The kids were very rowdy, running between tables, refusing to sit still. The book is a long one for a picture book, and it took much longer than we expected it would to read, in large part because I kept having to stop to get everyone to calm down, go back to their seats, and listen. Finally Liz, one of the staff, suggested that we move the kids over to sit on the carpet. We did, and it worked much better: we realized later that it was probably because when they were sitting at their tables, I was showing the pictures to the tables individually, and the kids would get antsy and want to come over to see the pictures before it was their table's turn.

The kids had done a pretty good job of listening for the things we asked them to listen for. Reading Strega Nona (which Patrick did) went much more quickly/smoothly, but we were still running very close on time. It was 5:00 when we closed the book. Obviously, we didn't get to the third book (our least favorite of the three, anyway). We voted quickly; it was Strega Nona by a landslide -- probably had a lot to do with the fact that many of them had read it before.

This is a day in particular where we really misjudged how long things were going to take, and a very bad day to have the kids trying to sit and listen to a story...their sugar highs were at a peaking point, after all. I wish we hadn't been so rushed on a day that's relatively crucial to the process: choosing what our final performance is going to consist of. However, I think the kids are all happy with the choice of story, and I think there are a lot of things we can do with it that will be fun.

The next task is for us to come up with a really thorough plan of action for the next three weeks, which is a quite limited amount of time (fingers crossed for no more snow days). We still want to accomplish having the kids come at this story from the perspective of character, so we want them to be able to get to know who their character is as well as possible, make costumes/props, etc., while still having a cohesive final product that will be fun for them to perform and their parents to watch.