Play Practice

Work on our community helper 'play' is moving along... a bit of a slow start but we are figuring out and learning how to integrate this whole concept of performing a play into our PreK world.  As you may recall, inspiration to write a play came from the children wanting to "put on a play on the real stage and be real actors...".   The children's connection to their role of community helper whom they had studied earlier in the year was still strong, and using the community helper theme seemed like a natural extension to this work. What better way to explore literacy ...where do we begin...???

Jonathan Shandell's expertise in theater and in working with young children in play writing guided us on this new territory. Each child contributed  in the writing of the play by verbalizing what they thought their  community helper would say or do as the story evolved.  When the writing of the play was finished, we listened to the story several times and  became more comfortable with  the flow and content of the 'story'.  The next stage was figuring out how to move from the adult telling the story to the children performing the story;  learning the words and actions that would create  the actual play.  A new challenge for both the teachers and the students; this type of work was new for us and we tried several different strategies before discovering ones that worked!  We contacted Jonathan and he suggested that we break the rehearsals into very small segments with just a few lines that needed to be memorized with very few children in each group.  The literacy skills that the  children are practicing in this process are quite remarkable; recall, memorization,  public speaking, and attentive listening skills.

Jason, our Lower School music teacher, has generously offered his time and support in this work as well.  A community helper song has been written and we will be practicing with Jason in additional music sessions over the next few weeks to learn the songs.  The children , and teachers, are very excited to see this process actually coming together and we will be letting you know when we feel we will be ready to do  a live performance.