Last week we had another successful week at Higher Achievement! We are definitely getting more comfortable with our group and they are feeling more confident around us and with working on the play. There were roughly the same amount of kids, a few less and one or two added, but the level of excitement and participation remained the same. We started off the meeting with another theatre game because we felt it really worked well for us last time and engaged the kids in a fun way before we asked them to be more serious. We played the mirror game and they were having so much fun that one of the peer leaders at Higher Achievement came into the room asking what all the noise was about. Thankfully, we got them to quit down for the next section but I honestly just love seeing them excited about the theatre games. Hopefully, this will result in less nerves or cold feet when the actual production comes.

Similar to our last meeting, we split into smaller groups after the game and worked on their pronunciation and delivery of Shakespeare’s lines. In my group, the boys were just as eager as last time and one of the new girls was surprisingly just as willing to come out of her shell and kept asking if we could read through her lines next. There is definitely still work to be done and some of the students are better at reading that others, but they are still doing much better than I anticipated. After the small groups, we came back together as a whole group and asked if there were any volunteers who wanted to read their lines. Their excitement and willingness to participate was great, but we were definitely more boy dominated when it came to participants. That is going to be one of my goals for the next few weeks, to get all the girls as excited as the boys about the play and hopefully have them feeling less shy about performing in front of everyone. Overall though, I thought it was another great week and can’t wait to keep working on their performing skills.