This week’s meeting was great! We went into it with a rough plan of what we wanted to talk about and this helped us stay on track. We began by reviewing a plot outline of our Act. Before the meeting, we sent a written outline to the teacher and he printed it out for the students. This helped the students focus on what we were going to cover in our scenes. We then began to discuss what sort of methods they wanted to use to visualize the play. They were keen on using action figures and drawing so we are going to do a combination of the two!

I found this week to be rewarding and much more productive than last week because we had a plan, and the students were engaging with the material. There was little involvement from the teacher in the classroom, which proved to help their focus on the four of us. They seemed to be very excited by the use of drawing and action figures and began to brainstorm some creative ways to display the party scene! As a spoiler, there might be a Halloween pool party coming your way soon!

We ended by discussing ideas for drawings they might create and asked them to use some free time to sketch ideas for the party scene and lockerroom scene!

This week started with some re-introductions because we had some new group members (5 people now with 2 of the same students as in Week 1). The teachers said it was because they rearranged the students based on engagement and interest in the project. These students definitely seemed a little more enthusiastic about the project. We then had to re-assign students to the scenes and explained more about the act to them to familiarize the new group members. Once we decided on which students would handle which scenes, they worked together to choose which action figures they wanted to play each of the characters for the adaptation that their teacher purchased for them. They decided to have Hero as Moana, Claudio as the Hulk, Don Pedro as Iron Man, Leonato as Batman, Benedick as Spiderman, and Beatrice as a character from Trolls. Their teacher was not that good at keeping them engaged and could do better in making sure they’re listening throughout the session. However, as the meeting went on they became more engaged, especially when picking the action figures. It was overall a good jumping off point that will put is in a good spot to get more into the details of the scenes next time. So far we decided that Leonato will challenge Claudio and Don Pedro to a basketball game in Scene 1 and are going to keep Claudio as a boy. They expressed some interest in maybe making Claudio a girl as Claudia and Hero a boy, but ultimately decided against it.