April 13th

I finally saw my other group of kids today!!! It had been almost a month since I had least seen them so it was great catching up on what they had been doing, how their break was etc. I started the class with a writing warm up exercise called "Chain Fairytale" where every kid starts with their own sheet of paper and in a minute writes down the beginning of a fairytale they have never read/heard of before. At the end of the minute each kid passed their sheet to the right and once again everybody had a minute to expand upon the fairytale. We did this until each kid had a chance to expand upon every fairytale but their own and then we took turns reading aloud each one. It was hilarious and a great way to start the class. They liked it so much they asked if we could do the game all over again at the end of class.

After that, I had to basically reintroduce our goal for the semester--each student writing and completing a one act play--which at this point isn't reasonable to expect due to all of the disruptions in the calendar. Nevertheless, the kids worked very hard for the rest of the period. I'm looking forward to reading them over this weekend especially since there seems to be a lot of creative writers in the group. Since I'm probably only going to see this group one more time this semester I think I am going to try to work with Frankie and make our last session a party with sharing work, playing writing games and generally celebrating both the students' cooperation as well as Ms. Saar's, through this process. I'm really sad I didn't get to spend more time with this group because I really like the students. I think if I had more time we'd really have a class set of fantastic finished products.