Middle School Drama Group Week 2
Before heading off to the second week of Middle School Drama Practice at church, I did some serious strategizing about how I was going to maintain the focus of the nine energetic 11-14 year olds. Last week, the boys and girls were trading verbal jabs and the boys informed me that the girls had cooties and that they wanted their own script. No problem. I have the perfect boy script. After looking through my script book I found a script that would work for the six girls. If I put all of the girls in a group, then I would only have two groups to train and I could easily split them and do half hour with the girls and half hour with the guys. Divide and conquer. Good plan.
I arrived at church and discussed my plan with the Middle School Pastor and we agreed on the times for girls first and then guys. He told me which room he reserved for us. One of the girls from last week ran up to me and said, “I’ve been so excited all week for drama class!” It really started the day out right for me.
I went upstairs to join Vic for the singing part of the church service. Half way through, I realized that I hadn’t run copies of the scripts, so I went to the education office and ran the girl’s script and started on the boys when the machine jammed in three places. I cleared two of the three but the girls were arriving right at that minute and I couldn’t stay and finish.
All the girls arrived plus one new one and they were definitely excited to be there. That always makes a teacher feel good. Instead of trying to win them over, they were already with me and wanted to work. We did a couple of warm up exercises and talked about voice and diction. Then we read through the script twice. Each time they took a different part. It’s a multi-character script that has only been performed as a drama solo. The soloist did all six parts, with ethnic voices. This time the six parts will be done by the girls giving it a whole new life.
What surprised me is that two of the girls really nailed a couple of the accents. Now if two others can manage the other two accents, it will be downright exciting. I told them to take the script home and practice reading all the parts and next week, I’ll decide who gets what part. However, I had six speaking parts and seven girls.
Today, I reworked the script, so there are more speaking parts and figured out how all the girls will be used in various ways. It should be good.
When the girls went back downstairs, I ran to see if the boy’s script had gotten run off by a good Samaritan. No luck there. I went back to the room and the boys were a no show. I checked downstairs and one of the guys told me, “We talked and we decided that we have too many other activities, so we’re not going to do it.”
Later, the youth pastor’s wife told me they were mostly excited about getting out of Sunday School and really didn’t want to work on anything. So, I didn’t need the guy’s script anyway. I wish they would’ve told me at the beginning of the hour, because the girls could’ve stayed for the whole hour then.
I did talk to the high school pastor to see if I can get a helper from the high school group and he’s working on that for me. So thus ends my second week at Middle School Drama. Seeing how excited the girls are made it a ton of fun for me.
Author Profile: Kathy Varis is a speaker, writer, personal coach and mentor, musician, youth drama guru, educator, a codirecting member of the FOCUS Leadership Team at Portland State University, and a long-time campus minister with Chi Alpha Campus Ministries. Kathy served 12 years as a lead instructor at Mt Hood Community College directing the Rockwood Lifelong Learning Center, helping establish the Mt Hood Literacy Coalition. She has lived with her husband and family in the Hawthorne district of southeast Portland since 1992. Read more from this author
