Best Moments of the 2010-2011 School Year- Part 1 The Wildcat Theatre Workshop

When the school year starts to come to a close, I can't help but reflect on all its big events, especially in our drama department.  This is my life.  So many hours of my time as well as my students' time goes into our productions and activities all year.  I would like to devote some space here to showcase and reflect on our accomplishments.

Above everything, there was one event I was extremely proud of this past year.  We called it the Wildcat Theatre Workshop.  The idea for this workshop came from my 2009-2010 drama officers, but this year our group was able to bring it to fruition.   Our goal was to provide a day where we could allow younger students to come to Millard West High School for a theatrical experience.  We want to promote creativity and theatre in our community and give young students an opportunity to participate in it.  I thought maybe we would have 30 participants if we were lucky.  We ended up with over 100 youngsters, grades 3-8!!

Here is what we did:

We broke students up into groups of roughly 10-12, with two or three high school leaders.  Each group was assigned a fairy tale story (nothing too well known) and the leaders explained or read the story to their groups in various locations around our theatre department.

Here, Sarah and Cassie and Jordan familiarize their group with its story in our Auditorium lobby.

After some planning and rehearsal time, we all the groups rotated between three separate stations.

One was a "costume" station where students got to decorate T-shirts based on their characters.  We color coded the groups for organizational purposes and the colors of the shirts matched the group color.  We used fabric markers for decorating and students got to take their T-shirt home with them!

Students decorating T-shirts in our Black Box Theatre.  You can see the set to our Spring play in the background.

When students were done with the shirts, they got to pick out some props that might add a little pizzaz to their story.  (It was fun picking out these silly objects at Michaels).

Another station was an acting station, where the leaders would help each student perfect the blocking and characterization for the students.

Bailey, Taylor and Kyle directed students in the light room. I was so proud of my high schoolers!

 The final station (or first depending on each groups schedule) was the "Set design" station, where students used fat poster markers to draw on a double wide sheet of butcher paper.  The drawing was supposed to represent the setting of the story and the whole group had to work together on it.  The scene shop got really crowded, but they had fun!

This is the crowd drawing their "sets" on paper in the scene shop.

Each backdrop was hung on a rolling white board and was used during the final performances behind the actors as their set.
After all the groups went through every station, some played games or talked about how they could improve their show for later.

Allie and Payton's group played games outside the scene shop while they waited.

Then we fed the students lunch in the cafeteria, and after, prepared for our final performances in the Auditorium where we would have a large audience of friends and family.

The pictures didn't turn out very well of the final performances, but you can get the idea here of what it looked like in our auditorium.  The little kids were so cute performing and the audience loved it, and took plenty of video and pictures of their childrens' first experience on the stage.

The white group was mostly 3rd graders.

This is the purple-ish group. :)  Maybe we could have called them light indigo?

We followed the 45 minutes of presentations with a cake reception in the cafeteria.  My high school students and I were exhausted afterward, but we think that all the young thespians had a wonderful day.  I was so proud of our work.  AND we raised over $1200!!  (It cost $25 per student to register for the workshop.  Lunch and a T-Shirt was included in that price, plus we had the kids from 8:30 a.m.- 2:00p.m.  Try finding a babysitter you can pay less than $5 an hour!)

With the turn out we had this year, we plan to do TWO workshops next year.  We will do one for 3rd-5th graders, and one for 6-8th graders.  That way, we can hopefully keep the groups smaller and design the workshops differently to be more appropriate for the age groups.