Woo hoo! After almost a day, I was reunited with the Ray boys. I doubted that they would remember me, but they did and they were even looking for me! Woot!
Anyway, on to the class. This class was a training to help us as teachers be in the moment of the story. We need to feel comfortable not knowing what is going to happen next. We talked a lot about what makes things funny in an improv situation and then we got to work!
Our first practice was an improv game called One Word Story. In this activity, each player stands in a circle. One person starts the story with one work (Once) and the next player adds another word (upon)...etc. The goal is to have a cohesive, smooth story. Wow! This was really freaking hard. But we all agreed that it is a great team-building activity for our students and would also teach them a lot about being respectful of others' answers in our TPRS classroom. With only one word, it was hard for us to actually create a story with a problem and solution. Instead, we just kept adding details and characters and locations. Hmmmm...sound familiar?
Our second practice was called Conducted Story (I think). One player sits in the middle of the circle and "conducts" the story by pointing to different players for differing amounts of time. This was much easier and we actually had some story lines that made us laugh quite a lot. One of the girls in my group had me on the floor with two words that were completely unexpected. It wasn't that what she said was necessarily that funny, but it was sooooo out of left field that I had to laugh and missed a key part of the story. Luckily, Cheri from Lee's Summit was there to get our story back on track.
The goal of this session was not to find activities to take back to our classrooms for students to do, but rather to start to feel more comfortable with the unknown. Very fun!!
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