Day 2 - January 28, 2015

Classmates TRYING to apply make-up to my face.  Grade 11 preparing for final drama performance..

Today was the first week of class presentations.  The theory focused on during the presentation was Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development.

The topic focused on was Residential School so it was a bit heavy for so early in the morning.  This always felt weird to me, I tend to avoid really serious topcs kind of in general because I would rather talk about something silly and fun and more relevant to young students than something like the Residential Schools.  Don't get me wrong, I understand the importance of a topic like this, it is just not my cup of tea.  With that out of the way, I would like to say that since this topic makes me uncomfortable the group and the activities we did were great for making me feel at ease as well as expressing ideas about Residential Schools.

One of the activities we used was a flash back where people would act out some scenes from the book.  Next was an eavesdropping activity where you would pretend to listen in on a conversation from the story.  After this was the hot seat where someone would have to take a role from the story while we asked them questions.  This was more up my alley, I love improv activities like this.  I remember this morning people were a bit reticent to answer questions, I tried to ask as many as possible so the activity was not de-railed.  The last activity the group did was position-mapping like we did in the first class.  We were to decide on whether or not we thought that residential school still affected aboriginal peoples to this day.

I'm close to the chair because I believe that these schools still affect people today.

After Kari-Lynn led us through some other activities that included a sort of choral reading that when done together sounded very cool and powerful.  There was also tableaux that we created and while in our tableaux's we had to do a voices in the head activity where we would give a voice to what our character/tableaux was feeling.

Now even though I love improv I realize good improv can be very difficult to do (unless it's something like the Question game).  So I don't know if I would use it beyond what was used in this class with the hot seat activity (which I think can be actually be a very valuable activity to try to get students to look at the world through someone else's perspective/point of view.