After a very successful first semester, the students came
back from winter break with just as many creative ideas to kick off 2015 as
they had blown us away with in 2014!
With an ambitious semester ahead of us consisting of song writing,
choreography, role assignments, creation of sets and costumes, and more, we
wanted to get off to an upbeat start by having fun and using our
imaginations! Our first class after the
break, the kids started off the day by enthusiastically singing “A Terrific
Tale.” Following that, the children
laughed hysterically as groups competed to see which group could repeat the
most tongue twisters in a row, and who could do it the fastest: “Toy Boat, Toy Boat, Toy Boat…” and “Unique
New York.” Then they created very unique
stories in the drama game: “Fortunately,
Unfortunately.” Here’s how the game
works: one student starts with a simple sentence such as: “There was a monkey who wanted to be
famous.” The next person adds on to the
story by saying, “Fortunately, the monkey had a lot of money…” The next student contributes by saying,
“Unfortunately the monkey had bad breathe…”
The game switches between the two adverbs until the story is
complete. Between the classes, we had
stories about very eclectic dreams one can have a night time, exploding bird
nests, and walking pickles in heaven. In
effort to keep the creativity flowing, we played a classroom game of
Pictionary. In rotation, a group of
three students would run to the board to draw the secret subject which I would
reveal to them, while another group would guess what it was. This game proved to make our goal of ‘having
fun,’ a goal met, as the drawings under strict time constraint, left much up to
the imagination, and for those guessing, a difficult task indeed.
The
grandiose and witty minds of the students never cease to amaze me and I can’t
wait to see what they continue to create!
The experiences that have been the most noteworthy to me are the breakthroughs
we see when students who may have started off the fall semester very shy, now are evolving into the most
creative and active participants in the classroom! That is what Opera for All is all about, to help students find their inner
artist and to instill confidence in each student as they grow in their
understanding of the world of opera, the arts, production and performing. As the year moves forward, I believe OFA will
be a catalyst for such growth.
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