Week One:

I have been looking forward to meeting the kids ever since we have begun the project earlier on in the semester. I have worked in the theater since I was ten years old and I have been mentoring kids just as long, so this project feels like the perfect combination of both!! The kids are absolutely wonderful. They have so much energy and enthusiasm about learning about the project and play. We asked the kid if they ever heard of William Shakespeare. All of them immediately started rambling about he was probably some old smart dead dude and that they had heard of him but never read him. There answers were genuine and hilarious. We were able to explain the basic project and talk about the scene are group was given. They loved the idea about the prom! I’m looking forward to our meeting this Monday and can’t wait to hear what they have to say.

I love working with kids. They can be difficult, but they approach things with such originality and honesty in a way that adults do not. I can already tell this is an amazing opportunity for us to experience Shakespeare with them. Our first meeting went as I expected. It took a few minutes for the students to warm up to us, but I feel like once we get them interested in specific aspects of the play, we’ll be able to engage with them more.

Moving forward, I am definitely excited to see how they want to create the play. While I feel like I have a general vision for Act V, I am more interested in how the students want to portray the characters and events. I want to see if they found the same issues with Much Ado that we did, and I hope they want to make some of the same changes we envision.

This week we began to meet with the children with whom we will be working on our scene with. The three students in the room were all great to meet, and seemed very interested in what we were doing. As we explained what the project was supposed to look like, they tossed out ideas and even brought up how they use robots in their classroom, and whether or not they could use those robots in their videos. We also had them watch a quick synopsis of what Much Ado About Nothing is about, in order to make sure that they understand the context of what the project will look like on their end. I know that COVID-19 will make this year different than previous years, but that being said, it doesn’t not mean that the project will be any less interesting. We have an opportunity to interact with kids and potentially teach them skills like recording and sound editing if they want to learn, and we in turn could learn about these robots that they are now being taught to use in class (I once took a Lego robotics class, I wonder if its anything like that). Anyways, I am extremely excited to work with my group members and with the students. If we can keep the positive momentum I saw on Monday, then I know that we will end up with a successful project.

Going into this week, I was a little nervous but also very excited to meet the kids. I did not know what to expect, especially with everything being on google meet, but I was pleasantly surprised with the overall experience. Despite some technical difficulties in the classroom, both the students and their advisors were very interactive with us and the material. Even though there were only two kids in attendance, it seemed as if there were excited to learn about us and our project, which inspired me to thoroughly describe and keep the project interesting for them and for us. Most of the meeting was small talk and introductions, but it was refreshing and I think thats what the kids needed. Most of my classes are in person this semester, which I am very thankful for, but this project has made me realize the virtual education world is especially challenging with younger students (getting them to focus, engage in course material, etc). Overall, I am very optimistic about the Jepson Shakespeare Experience and I am eager to see how many/which students engage with the material next week.

I’m in Group 5 and we are working with four fifth-graders that each had different levels of interest in the project. Our interaction started with the students from Stage and Screen introducing themselves and sharing a fun fact. Then our students introduced themselves and then we watched a summary video of Much Ado About Nothing. Some of them were confused, but one student seemed to grasp the content very well.

In the end, we decided to break Act IV up by scenes. 2 students are focusing on scene 1 and 4. The remaining two students are working on scene 2 and 3 individually. We quickly realized they weren’t too interested in making illustrations, so we may be moving forward with recording videos of action figures or legos. Another suggestion they gave was to incorporate music. Hopefully we can build off of these ideas and get them excited to be retelling Shakespeare.

One challenge I see us working to overcome is that all four students are one classroom. This will make checking in on the progress of the individual scenes more difficult, but I’m still excited to see how this goes!

Monday was my group’s first meeting with the HEF students from the Wilder virtual program. I was originally pretty nervous to meet the kids, especially because I have never used Microsoft Teams and wasn’t sure how the meeting would go virtually. However, because of my group and how engaged the kids were, the meeting went very smoothly! We started with an ice breaker and had the kids say their names and their favorite ice cream flavor. Next, we talked to the kids about what what the plot of Much Ado is, and introduced the characters. Finally, we suggested some ideas for the adaptations we’d be doing. The kids were really excited and funny, I am excited to work more with them!

The first meeting with HEF this week was a nice introduction to the kids we will be working with and gave us a better sense of how to move forward with the project. We started by introducing ourselves and having the four kids introduce themselves. Some seemed more quiet and uninterested than others, so we definitely need to come up with more ways to keep them engaged and excited about the project. We then showed them a video explaining the plot of Much Ado About Nothing and answered any questions they had about it to help them better understand what the original play is about. We finished by explaining that we will be recreating Act V in a high school setting. The kids overall seemed a little confused about the project, but I think with more meetings and discussions they will start to understand more. The four students decided to divide the four scenes in the act with one working on Scene 2, one working on Scene 3, and two working on Scenes 1 and 4 together. The teacher was able to help facilitate some discussion and attempted to keep them engaged and listening to us but it was a little difficult to gauge their interest virtually. Some ideas we came up with to try to make them more excited about the project were the possibilities of incorporating music, Legos, or other figurines in the adaptation. In the future it would probably benefit us to have a better laid out plan to keep them engaged, but overall it was a good introduction!

This week was really good, and it got me more excited about the project. Going into our first meeting I was anxious about if our kids were going to be engaged, or if they were going to want to participate. But, they are so excited about the project, and they have so many amazing ideas. The challenge will definitely be figuring out how to bring their ideas into our adaptation and how to make things make sense with the rest of the play. I am a little concerned about equity within the class, I want to make sure that the girls are being heard as much as the boys. There was one boy who had really good ideas, but he didn’t use the raise hand feature like the other students were. I want to make sure that he isn’t talking over other people in the future. Going forward I want to create a few more boundaries so that we are using our time really efficiently. I initially thought an hour sounded like a lot, but now it feels like we honestly could have gone for another hour.

My group’s first meeting with our community partners went well! I was a bit nervous about how Monday’s meeting would go, considering we had no idea what age the students would be, what previous Shakespeare experience they would have, or even how many would be assigned to our group. For the most part, these nerves subsided once our Microsoft Teams meeting began. I never thought I’d be presenting Shakespeare to a group of 15 or so fifth and sixth-graders; however, the experience was less chaotic than I expected it to be. Excluding a few very minor instances of talking over other students, the students were all well-behaved, engaged, and raised their hands politely using the “raise hand” feature. We realized that we would get the most kids to participate by including them directly in the decision-making process, rather than simply telling them what our class had already decided. For a large portion of the meeting, we (UR students) offered some limited options about the plot, and the students expressed their own opinions about which directions we should take our adaption. I was shocked that, when asked how Don Pedro should set up Claudio and Hero, most students thought that it should be done in-person instead of online. Overall, for having never heard of Much Ado About Nothing, the kids were very excited to be involved in deciding what elements of the story we should keep or change. I look forward to continuing our discussion of the plot and officially voting on the options we provided next week!

Meeting our group of kids was really exciting, yet very chaotic. Our group is composed of five fifth graders, ranging from very outgoing to very quiet, which I think is going to be a struggle that we make sure that we include everyone’s voices. I was really excited to meet the kids because I normally volunteer at Youth Life after school and the kids are the same age, however, due to Covid, I have been unable to do so this semester. The format of zoom was definitely super chaotic because it was hard to 1. hear them, and 2. get them to not talk over one another, however, I think that it is good that we have smaller group so that we can hopefully get them to all be able to participate. The teacher in the classroom was not super helpful in controlling them and I felt as though she maybe could’ve done a bit more, but I also could not imagine being in her shoes. Hearing the kids reactions to what happens in Much Ado was really funny because they thought that it was so outrageous that everyone is trying to fool eachother and Hero fakes her own death. A lot of their comments highlighted the importance of an adaptation that they will be able to relate to and understand because the concept of wanting to marry someone at first sight, is a little as they called it “stupid”. Overall, I am looking forward to coming into the next meeting with a better outline and idea of what we want to do now that we know how it is going to work.