This week we had our last rehearsal with our kids. They seemed super excited to get back to rehearsals and greeted us right when we walked in the door. We had one of our girls, who came almost every week, casted as Viola but when we got to the site we learned that she had moved to “the south side” of town.

At the start of rehearsal a lot of the girls told us they had a cooking class for five minutes and would be at rehearsal when they were done. We found out that they actually did not have a cooking class and instead went somewhere to get brownies. Once they returned and we had our entire group, we had an extremely productive rehearsal.

We started by play a quick game that they all like called “Mr. Fox” then went straight into rehearsals. We asked all of them what parts they still wanted to play and asked if they wanted to have extras. Luckily Jamirah, who never really seemed as though she wanted to be at rehearsal, wanted a bigger role and decided to take on the role of Viola. We went through the entire act with them, asking them to act according to how they thought their character would act. We also brought them props to use and try on before the actual play. I think that this made them even more excited about the play, knowing they could wear crowns and tiaras. They did a much better job running through the scripts than I thought they would and did not have much trouble with the words. Tyvell, who played Duke Orsino, was my one concern because when he didn’t know any of the words he would jumble them all together or make up words. None of the kids made fun of him and it didn’t seem to bother him when he did this which I was happy about. Reading through the act took the majority of the rehearsal time so when we were done we asked the kids who had their permission slips in so we could get a possible number of how many we would have during the play. We sent them home with posters of play and could see how excited they were about it.