Voice and action catch up

I haven't had time to keep up with the blogging on my voice and action project, but the project itself kept moving along, despite fits and starts due to weather and unscheduled days off from school.

The class brought their work to performance level and presented it to the entire school this past Wednesday. I videotaped it from way in the back of the auditorium. It will be interesting to hear the results when I download the footage into iMovie.

Everybody in the class originally had a poem to perform. We couldn't perform all of them for the school due to time constraints, so I had the students combine their groups of 2 or 3 with another group of 2 or three. They could choose two poems, one from each group to work on as a performance.

The final presentation would also include the large group poems. The class had been divided in half for these poems, with two 5th grade drama students as directors. We started the show with Nobody and ended it with Twistable Turnable Man.

My initial reaction to the end result is that while my goal was to improve vocal quality and skills, my eyes were drawn to the originality and expressiveness of the student-created actions that sprang out of the text. I expect to report more as I put together a video time-line of the project. I also will be giving the students a survey to gain their insights as participants in the project. To gauge possible long-term improvements, I am working with the home room teacher to arrange a video taping in the classroom in which students read/recite out loud text connected to an academic subject.

I have one more section of 5th grade exploratory that just began this past week. We haven't begun training yet as their starting coincided with tech/opening of our spring musical. I am planning on using the same techniques I have refined in this past experiment.