Drama Club - 5/5/08

I think "Ugh" would be the best way to describe today's club. As always, I started in a good mood. It was a gorgeous day outside. My plan was to run the entire club outside. No tricks. No incentives. Just go right outside. I guess the only catch would have been that we would have done work but I still think that would have been a pretty good deal. Well it didn't work out that way. It started during snack time. One of the worst things that can happen during snack time is the spilling of a drink. Which, of course, happens all the time. The reason that this is such a catastrophe is because no one will actually admit that they spilled the drink. And they definitely don't rush to clean it up anytime soon. Being the responsible adult, I can't allow the group to leave without the mess being cleaned up. So I end up in a standoff with the kids about whose going to clean it up, and everybody saying that they didn't do it. That entire process took about 15 to 20 minutes. Just wasted time that we could have gone outside. And when they did eventually decide to clean it up, complete chaos broke out as every single kid decided that they wanted to be the one who would get towels to clean up the spill. So it went from no one wanting to handle it to everyone. As a result, I revoked the outside privileges. At least temporarily. We went to the auditorium and worked on the speech for the show. I worked on it with them as a group. I continued to used my trusty beanbag technique. I had them move the beanbag around in a circle as quickly as possible. It went fairly well. Unfortunately, you can't engage everyone all the time. There's always 2 or 3 or 4 kids that check out. So I had to keep reigning them in. But most of them managed to learn the first line. I decided to take them outside. But first we had to make bathroom trips. Well that process ended up taking about 15 minutes or so. Since that had taken so long, I had to cancel the trip outside. Needless to say, they weren't happy about that. And yet, for some reason, couldn't see how they were somehow partly responsible for that. Children can be so childish.