Every week we go to the Villa we a surprised with a mix of new students and some but not all of the old students. This week we had four new students that were required to be there by Timone. While fairly uninterested at first, over the course of the session they seemed more into it. For example, a new student named Jeremiah, first said he would be interested in a part that had no lines at all. However after reading the script with the rest of his peers and discovering he was one of the best readers, he felt much more comfortable with the idea of having lines. Derek was the same go-with-the-flow guy he always is and seemed to enojy reading his lines and becoming more familiar with his character of Banquo. Christina has settled into her role as lady Macbeth as well and seems to be enjoying the readings. Since we have had a new group every week, we are having trouble assigning smaller parts to students because we are unsure if they’ll be coming back next week (this week we lost two). While this week we just went though and read scenes together, next week we hope to get more specific and have people begin to play parts although this may not happen if our group is changed more.

Although I was not at Henderson this week, hearing about the experience from Bridget helped us brain storm ways to lead our upcoming sessions. Bridget was alone during this session, which I could only imagine how hard that must’ve been. There are still around 25 students coming each Monday. In Bridget’s session, she told us how she tried to play many games and get the children to read a script (not Macbeth), but had a very difficult time. Despite all efforts, even using games that you needed to be ‘silent’ for, the children were too riled up. Bridget, Carolina and I discussed how we might proceed moving forward. We think that next week we will split the group up into three. We will try to have an equal distribution in each group with kids who do and don’t want big parts. Then, we will assign these groups parts and each of us will be in charge of the individual group. This way, there will be less distractions for the kids and we can get to know them more personally. We also can then focus on specific acts in our scenes that we are assigned. Another thing we brought up was making sure we are strict right off the bat. Bridget described how she had to take away a couple of phones and separate some kids. If we are strict in the beginning of the session on no talking and  no phones, then we will hopefully gain more respect.