March 17 (Fri.)

Well, we pulled it off. Yesterday the plays were looking a little grim. We had no enthusiasm, no excitement, and so many mispronounced words that some of the kids were completely impossible to understand. Turk and I worked really hard with Claudia, who really wanted to be one of the narrators, but she was making such a mess of things that she couldn’t be understood at all. After slowing her down (a LOT) and writing out some phonetic spellings, marking syllables, and practicing over and over and over, she actually did a good job today. Gabby giggled through her lines, but she did them without her usual “Mrs. Joooooones!” Marking the syllables was really one of the most helpful strategies for the pronunciation problems we were having. Sumaya figured things out better with that support as well.

Jarrelle was my only true disappointment. He was so active and full of emotion and energy yesterday, but as soon as his ‘cool’ pals from next door walked in the, he was a different child. He mumbled his lines and didn’t even look at the audience. Jerome did the same kind of thing, but he was still audible. He put his hood on and turned towards the wall for the majority of the play. He did really well with all of the difficult vocabulary, and I could tell he had practiced really hard. It was still really sad to see the change in both of these boys, while every body else was still having fun with it.

Overall, the plays were a great break from the doldrums of essay writing, and they provided a nice bridge into finishing up the oral tradition material.