Today was our culminating presentation day. We had the students work on finishing their set design drawings and rehearsing their scenes for about 20 minutes. When we came back together as a group, I asked the students to take out a sheet of paper and write one comment and one suggestion about each presentation, keeping in mind the criteria for each activity. The students presented in the order that I had assigned, so I could mix up the set designs with the scenes. All of the set designs turned out to be fabulous. Jesus and Antonio, who drew a scene from the carnival, had made their set design to look like a real theater, from the perspective of the audience. Anahi presented her drawing of the downtown scene and blew everyone away with her artistic ability. Valerie and Kathy, two of the very quiet students, had drawn the library scene. They didn’t finish on time because of the great detail they were going into on the bookshelves, coloring each book individually. Chane and Yessica drew the boys’ houses and made it very vibrant and colorful. Floyd recorded his rap on the camera so we can watch it tomorrow. Then three groups presented skits. Two of them were well thought out and put together, but the other was not really rehearsed well. It might have been because we had a more relaxed atmosphere in the last class and the activity kind of changed from what we had originally planned. This group had a great idea, they just hadn’t scripted it enough and thus their skit dragged on for too long without focus. I asked them to go outside and work on it more so they could present again tomorrow. Since we finished all of these presentations early, we played some improv games. We played a new one called “what are you doing?” that emphasizes body language and actions, then we played Freeze, which we had played on the first day. It was amazing to see how the students had improved. They were now calling out freeze on their own, without us forcing them to. And they were being more creative with their scene choices. I’m not sure if it was because they are more comfortable with us now, or because they have improved on their own acting skills. Hopefully both are true. As a culminating activity day, I think today was successful. The comment pages of the students show that they were engaged in the works of their classmates and they were attempting to think critically about each others’ presentations.
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