Choral speech

Four day work week, and only three of those days will be spent with my 5th grade group. Time to change it up. and move on to choral work.

I handed out a copy of Shel Silverstein's Twistable, Turnable Man to the class. Since everybody was looking at the poem as it was handed to them, there was no way I could capture a true cold reading -- but that was ok. A first time group effort is bound to be ragged, so I asked them to think up tactics that would help them in reading it cold. They talked about slowing down, about looking for punctuation, and about listening to each other as they read. All really good suggestions!

We read through it and it wasn't horrible, with only a few spots of jumbled voices and out of synch speech. We discussed what happened and the poem itself. What it was about. Which were the action words, the adjectives and nouns -- but in terms of performance rather than language arts quiz questions. Since we have been working on physicalizing words, they were quick to locate the verbs and visualize what possible actions could accompany them. The adjectives apply the colors, tastes and textures of the scene, while the nouns are actors and props.

I gave them another Silverstein poem called Nobody which we read through together. Again, the work was not bad for a first run through. I then had the class count off in twos, and gave the ones Twistable Turnable Man and the twos Nobody. I appointed a choral leader for each group, selecting two drama students in order to give them directing opportunities.

They practiced at either end of the room. I put two costumes racks as barricades, to keep them from distracting each other and to help buffer the sound a bit. By the end of the period, one group was well on its way to finding actions to match the poem. The other group was having some conflicts.

Today, the groups continued to work on their poems. I noticed that the Nobody group's leader was trying to make the process "democratic" by asking everybody for their opinion. They were getting bogged down in conflicts over suggestions. I talked to them briefly about how some works require a single viewpoint -- does an orchestra require ten conductors?

The Twistable Group had gone a long with its leader's vision, and was well on its way to creating a performance. Both groups will polish their work tomorrow and present to each other at the end of the class.