Thursday 19 March 2009

Home

After explaining to Bex that we were not actually north and that we were no where near heart beat county, we got to my house. We spent Saturday and Sunday round Leicester finding out about venues and letting the girls get used to the area a little. This was good as they got a feel for Leicester and used to the mix of different cultures there. Venue wise however we did not come up with very much at all!

Our week at school was really good, we really enjoyed teaching, the kids were very enthusiastic and well behaved. We had decided that our workshops would be focused around storytelling.

We asked the students to get up tell us their name and maybe something about their name, such as Bex dad wanted to call her Fanny when she was born, she would have been known as Fanny Frier...i wish Bexy! Then i posed the question, what do you first think of when i say 'Storytelling?' The response was as expected...Children, bedtime and fairy tales, so then i9 asked them what they thought they were being shown at the Cinema or at the theatre. How everything is a story and then talked about comedians and using their won lives and observations to create story's.

We played games each person choosing a word such as 'Tropical or School' placing them in the middle then going round in a circle we created a story using the words from the middle. They seemed to really enjoy this, the first time we did it there stories were very funny and a little abstract, However, the second time we asked them what makes a good story. The second time we tried to give the story a beginning, middle and end. They were really focus and worked really hard on the stories. We then spoke about our own stories and how an actor becomes someone else on stage and how hard it must be to get up and create your own personal stories.

In 3 small groups then they had to devise a 2 minute piece that was a true fairy tale but each group had to pretend to speak a different language, this was really funny my group did Peter Pan in German. It was fun and meant they had the chance to act and get to know one of us better, and also gave us a chance to see the strengths of groups and even learn some names. We spoke to them after about how great the pieces were and also how we don't need to rely on words, just the physicality of their bodies.

The second group we taught had an overlap of two students Ellie and Ollie, so we quickly changed the lesson plan a little for them, we got the groups to create a whole new fairy tale and speak in gobbledy gook! These were very funny...and though this group was a lot shyer than the last they did get up and work very hard on the pieces.

The next6 two groups we taught were A level and AS level, and there were only 4 of them in the group. This was really nice, funnily we didn't get as much work done with them as they really enjoyed talking about what they were doing, this was fine as they were getting to know and trust us. Instead of getting them to create small pieces in the group we asked them to write a word that they thought would provoke a story, Friendship, Holiday, etc. Then tell a 2 minute story about themselves. They were brilliant, I showed my story first about my travels that i did for the storytelling module at uni. Kat and Bex also joined in with all the exercises so we were on a level with them rather than just standing and saying do this, do that!

This was our first sessions with the groups and i really enjoyed them, the fact that we had respect straight away was brilliant, we did have a joke with them, but tried to stay in a professional role as well. I think it worked out really well, Ellie even said and i quote... 'Have we got you again...your cool!' This made my day...i was never cool at school.

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