After our surprising night off last week, we had a pretty successful night at Higher Achievement this week! We started off the night by breaking up into our new three groups, based chronologically on the events in Act I. I was in charge of the first three pages of Act I, which consisted of the characters Theseus, Hippolyta, Egeus, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander. The first time we sat in a circle around a table and practiced the lines sitting down. For some reason the classroom has chairs with wheels on them so the children had a pretty difficult time focusing and kept wheeling around everywhere. While it was pretty difficult to keep them calm and still, they were pretty successful at reading their lines. I then had my group practice their lines once again standing up, as if they were actually performing. I gave them advice such as not holding the script in front of their face and to make sure they are loud enough for the audience to hear. Once the kids stood up and performed their lines they got significantly more into it. For example, one of the kids was walking back and forth in the front of the classroom, acting as if it was the stage. He was also using hand and body gestures which I found incredibly amusing.

We ended the rehearsal by playing a tongue twister game which the children really enjoyed. I just looked up tongue twisters on my phone and would have the kids go in a line and repeat the ones I said. It eventually escalated into all the kids competing to see who can see it correctly the fastest. We had a bunch of rounds and then a championship round between the two best. The winner got to take home one of the JSP posters we brought. The kids had a lot of fun with this game and they were also really impressed with the posters, so we’ll be sure to bring more next week! We also gave a few posters to the organizers so they could hang them around the school. The kids are getting more and more excited each week to come to our school and keep asking if their parents can come. They have gotten really into the play which is really cool to see and I’m excited to go back next week for one of our final rehearsals before showtime!