Drama Club - 5/7/08

Today was a gorgeous day and I was determined to have club outside today. I saw a wonderful sight before club started. It was Jourdan's mother who had come to pick him up early. I did a nice little mental cartwheel. I knew then that I would at least have a chance to get some work done during the club today with him out of the picture. I swear that kid is just so disruptive. I announced to the kids that we were going outside to work. After the collective groan, I told them that they had a choice of working inside or outside. They chose outside. Honestly, I endured through the same shenanigans that I would have gone through inside. It just seemed a lot easier to deal with because I was outside. I also knew that any extra time I had at the end could be spent just letting the kids run around. So we did our standard warm up and then went right into the speeches. They know the words of the first speech so it was just a matter of the performance. I kept telling them to keep their energy up. I realized that one really cool saying that would help them do that was, "Play to Win." So I would say that periodically and that would spur them on. I also had to remind them to stop the fidgeting and the talking when it wasn't their line. Although I don't think they'll do that when they get on stage. We then moved on to Juliet's speech. I decided to break them up into two teams and split the lines up. With time running out, it's best to give them as few new lines to learn as possible. One team learned their lines rather quickly. The other team had focus issues. So, let the former team have free play time while the latter continued to work on the lines. After a few minutes of free play, I reigned everyone in and had them do it a couple more times just to keep it fresh in their minds. Why can't everyday be 70 degrees?