The Rookery

Since the first day of school, the Herons have asked when we were going to be doing "our play."  It's funny — while I was involved in drama in highschool and college, I didn't imagine I would do plays in my classroom.  But for the last four years, we have taken on a play and I think the learning the process engenders is very rich.

• Memorization – students are very motivated to get "off book" and often develop and share their own way to memorize lines.  It's an important skill and this is an authentic way to practice it.
• Oral presentation skills – "louder!"  "slower!"  "stop 'dancing'"  As we get ready to present the play, students internalize these basic public speaking skills so well that I become superflous (they say them to each other).
• Vocabulary/affect – In order to successfully act in a play, one must know what one is saying and how it should be said.  We spend a lot of time, especially when we are reading Shakespeare, making sure the meaning of the play is secure.  This focus on comprehension transfers into students' independent reading as they realize it's not enough to "get the gist" of something if they really want to enjoy it.
• Discipline – Once we get ready to perform, students are expected to be professionals at all time, both on the stage and off.  No one talks; no one fools around.  Everyone holds each other to high expectations.
• Team work  - we all have to work together to make a production happen.  If one person misses a line or an entrance, we all must problem solve to make the situation invisible to the audience.
• Writing and Revision – For the past two years, the Herons have created their own play.  We revise a lot to get the jokes right.  Through this process we talk a lot about audience, the anatomy of humor (it can't be an inside joke three times removed from the orignal joke), clarity and character.

This year, we decided we wanted to do a play about the Industrial Revolution — but the books we had read did not have enough characters (and were serious dramas, not something I feel as confident writing).  I read some American tall tales and the students quickly began to brainstorm how we could make these into a play.

Together, we identified the traits of many tall tale characters and students began making up their own including scary clowns and mill workers capable of super-human weaving feats.  These characters began to get wrapped into conversations about the other tall tale characters.  But we lacked a framework that would work to present the stories.

A silly brainstorming session by a group of kids at recess led to the idea of Romeo and Juliet being played by Davy Crockett and Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind.  The next two days, we spent our literacy block doing a readers' theater of Romeo and Juliet (I have a nicely abridged version that maintains a lot of the original language).  As we read, we strove to understand the story and looked for ways we could use the characters from the tall tales.

A committee began to use the abridged script to write our own tall tale version.  I wrote two brief monologues for people to use when they tried out.  Amazingly, almost every Heron gave the memorization a go and presented the monologue to the class in the gym.  I was hugely impressed, especially since I make it a point not to remind students to prepare because I need to get a feel for who will be able to memorize lines independently.

And here we are.  This weekend, I am working to incororate our first revisions.  I'm also casting the play (and creating a few new parts based on some students' heretofor unexpressed comic genius).  It's a lot of fun and we can't wait to share our work with you (a few weeks after Wolf Ridge).