I hope all of you had a fantastic winter break and holiday season! What a year it has been. I have a feeling 2016 is going to be great!  All middle school classes this week talked about what they did over break. I was going to have them write in their DDD but decided it would be fun to rehearse our skills.  I sent a group of students outside while the audience members were told what to look for.  I usually remind my students to project, have good articulation, use gestures, show emotion on their faces, make eye contact etc. but this time I did not say a thing. It was a good experiment. I want my students to start speaking in front of an audience naturally without me having to remind them.  We than had a discussion as to what could have done better and what they did well.

In fifth grade we almost finished blocking for “Lewis and Clark”. Please help your children with their lines.  They were supposed to be memorized in class this week and quite a few kids still needed to look at their scripts. We only have a couple of weeks until our informance. Sharon Rockhill will be sending more information about that! An Informance is when we invite you to come and watch. It is NOT a final product, but more of an opportunity to see what we do in class. It is work in progress. I believe learning along the process is more important than a final product.   Please also help your children learn their cues. They need to know who speaks before their line 🙂

In Sixth grade we started our mime unit! I love this unit! I really focus on how important body language is.  I want my students to familiarize themselves with their facial expressions depending on their emotion.  Some of my students say that they are mad, when performing a scene but won’t  look it.  Actors need to show how they are feeling and that is in the body…posture, gestures, and expressions.  I had my students mime an activity they did over break! It was really a fun exercise. Their other classmates had to guess what it was.  We also went through the main rules of mime.  Ask your children to tell you what they learned in class. I asked them to go home and memorized heights, sizes, and weights of things in their houses.  In order to mime you have to know these things to look believable on stage.

In Seventh grade we started our Shakespeare unit! Seventh graders will be performing “Twelfth Night”! I am really looking forward to this. In class we talked about the language of Shakespeare and how different it is from the way we talk and phrase sentences. I gave all my students a packet of Shakespeare speeches and insults to start to practice at home. Ask you children to read some out loud to you! The more comfortable they are the more confidence they will have during their audition in a couple of weeks, which will be a cold reading.

In Eighth grade we are working on our monologue unit! Each student is to choose a monologue and have it memorized and ready to perform in class in a couple of weeks. Please help your children with memorization at home. I will help them with the process in class. They will be using this monologue to audition for “The Little Mermaid” on January, 26th.  They will also sing and do a cold reading from the script.  We talked about what makes a good monologue and how they should go about choosing an appropriate one!