The people in charge moved my Drama Class for 6-9 year olds to another room. I now hold class in the multi-purpose room. It is huge, at least twice the size of the last room we used. Only one possible problem exists with a large room: the students have more room to run around. Fortunately, if it existed, they all did very well at controlling this urge.
Sadly, I lost a student this week. Utah joined the book club. I told you he was a reader. His mother assured me that he really liked my class, but it was thirty minutes instead of an hour this time and he had more friends in the book club. Nevertheless, my class continues to grow. Bunny enrolled in my class before any one else, but she got sick last week, so yesterday was her first official class. She has long limp hair hanging all around her tiny body, and her blue eyes always look confused until she grins. As you can probably guess, Bunny is very softspoken. Also, I have a new boy student; J. is his name. J. has small, pointed features, and a very sharp, imaginative mind.
Because of popular demand, we played the Murderer game. (Normal people might know this game as Detective Handshake.) But in all the circles I know, it is appropriately titled Murderer. This is a game of dying, secret scratching and great complaining if someone dies too quickly after being scratched, giving the murderer's identity away immediately. I try not to use this game in Drama Class too much, because I don't feel it accomplishes as much as other activities.
Therefore, we moved on, and spent most of the class developing characters. Everyone was surprisingly calm and attentive during this. Each student had a turn. On his/her turn, the student would sit in a chair. The rest of us sat on the floor. I had Dani go first. Her character, which she made last week, is a princess with pink hair; additionally, she loves the color pink, wears pink, has a pink room and a pink pet dragon.
“Does this girl have any siblings?” I asked.
“Yes, she has one brother,” said Dani.
“Was her brother born with strange colored hair, too?”
“No.”
“Oh, so her brother's kind of normal, but she's really different.”
“Yes.”
“Does anyone tease her or... How do people treat her, since she's different?”
“They just treat her nice,” said Dani, a perpetual happiest.
“Do they treat her like she's better than other people? Like she's special?”
“No. They just treat her like everyone else.”
As nice as Dani's character is, there's not much of a story yet.
I tried to ask the students, “What does your character want?” And I got a few promising answers.
J.'s character is a knight – an immortal Head Knight, to be precise. I asked J. what this knight wanted.
“Victory,” said J. “But he can never get victory,” he added.
“Why not?” I asked, very excited.
J. said that the enemy had tigers on its side (their claws are as long as the arm of a chair). He described a lot of fancy weapons that the enemy had, too. He practically gave me a play-by-play account of a battle, acting out the important maneuvers. I was kind of impressed, though this was not exactly what I was searching for.
Bunny, a fairy princess trapped in a snowglobe that she's lived in her whole life, gave a very good answer.
“She wants to know if there are more people out there.”
It sounded like a good story to me.
At first, Rachelle said her character was a maid, but then she decided that her character was a princess whom everyone treated like a maid.
“She wants to get respect,” Rachelle said.
This was another fantastic answer, possibly my favorite. Class was so short that I didn't have the chance to explore these characters as much as I wanted to. But I can't wait to interrogate them next week.
Thank you for reading.
Zachary W.
P.S. I don't think I have any eight year olds in my class, and I definitely don't have any nine year olds. In other words, I'm not actually talking about Tweens here. I mean, I would share these stories with people of any age, but I thought Tweenage readers might prefer to hear about kids their own age. So, what do you readers think? Would you like me to focus more on Tweens? Post a comment if you have something to say.
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