“Yes! Lets…Launch our story creating mission”

Yesterday, I started with facilitating a 6-week workshop series at Youngblood Art&Culture Development Centre in Cape Town. I want to share some of the activities we do in the workshops, how I scaffold the workshop and how we progress over the next several weeks. I usually choose a lens (in other words a theme) for the workshops, which serves as our filter for exploration, often inspired by stories,current affairs or the world around us. This workshop our lens is What do you do with an idea? (inspired by Kobi Yama’s beautiful book).

The goal of the workshop: to collaborate in in creating a story collaboratively for us to bring to life at the end of the 6 six weeks. Setting this goal is also how I start the workshop, and then ask the kids to help me brainstorm what we need to create a story. This activity allows us to establish the criteria we think is important for stories and also allows for us to develop understanding of the use of language and concepts. And so we launch our story crating mission.

Each kid get’s there own theatre makers journal, this is so that they can jot down ideas, reflect and create through drawing, cut and paste or writing. It’s something I like to give the kids as symbol that reinforces that they have ideas and that there ideas matter! I try and include reflective practices such as discussions and time for journaling so that kids can gain a deeper understanding of how they think, feel, and act and give time for their own observations about themselves and their experience.

This helps develop self-awareness and starts developing metacognitive processes of the brain. Even though metacognitive capacities improve with ages (really taking shape ages 12–15 according to research) my experiences working with kids has found journaling and reflective questions incredibly useful in helping kids learn to self-regulate and develop confidence in directing their own learning and observations, even in kids as ages 6–11.

I explain to the kids that we will be creators throughout the workshops and we will use our bodies, our faces, our voices and our imaginations to make different things and that there are lots of ways to make things.

First we introduce ourselves and do a gesture or action that shows how we feel about being at the workshop. I ask the kids to take a deep breath and say their name clearly as if talking into microphone to a big crowd “Hello I am …. and I feel…[emotion & gesture]”, the rest of the group will respond as if they are and enthusiastic, cheering crowd and respond “Hello …”. Think a excited crowd at a Beatles concert not an AA meeting. ;)

Next we play Space Walk, where participants are asked to move through the room in different ways, responding to the scenarios prompted by the facilitator, “Can you move as fast as you can! What happens if you move through a room of honey? How do you move if you were walking on the moon?”, the possibilities are endless. One is really trying to encourage participants to 1) use their imagination in response to the different space and 2) work individually in trying to embody how different spaces motivate different kinds of movement. We’re exploring bodies and imagination.

Next I reintroduce the idea that we are working collaboratively to create stories and ask the group for some ideas about what it means to collaborate? Responses include: “work as a team”, “listen to each other” and “be nice”. This serves as a moment for reflection and a link to our next game Yes! Lets… an improvisation game, where the group is required to give clear instructions, listen to their teammates and respond. One person give the direction “Yes! Let’s…[insert action word ie. read a book, eat ice-cream, play video games]” and the group responds by miming the activity, they can’t stop miming until the next instruction is given.

Our last game for the day, is my own variation of a game Story Rain I learned from a friend (Hye Ri Cho) at the Lincoln Centre Education. What it entails is making it rain with little pieces of paper, each of which have a random words written on it (think of those poetry fridge magnets). The kids sing “let it rain, let rain, let it rain, rain, rain” and have to do their rain dance. Only when they sing and dance loud enough does it begin to rain.

First kids select 3 words at random and then arrange them in different phrases, then they partner up and do reorganise them into their own little poems such as “Forest dancing glass colourful ice-cream nose” or “delicious chocolate singing rollercoaster pancake flowers”. One play with various combinations adding more words if you like, thus using the activity to springboard the creation of a story.

Before we ended the class with putting our “raindrops” in our collectors envelope (at the back of our journals) and I introduced the kids to our lens and asked them to help me think about this:

I asked them to write it down, and to think about it and to share what every came to mind in their journals as a picture, as a story or even just as single words written down. Before we wrapped up for the day I asked kids to share their initial thoughts about “What do you do with an idea?” one kid explained you “You make it in legos.” another said quite seriously “You share it!”.

And with that, we launched our story creating mission and ended our workshop with closing song “Mmm, I feel so good, like I knew I would, mmm I feel so good!”.