Unit 7 - Theatre in education

Thursday 5^th October

Today I went with my performing arts lecturer, Cara to Lord Scudamore Primary School to have a meeting with Sarah Watkins about the performance that we are putting together and will be performing for the children.

We arrived at the school at around 9am when we met Sarah and found a space to have the meeting. Prior to the meeting I had written a list of questions to ask Sarah once we had explained to her what ideas we had. Some of the questions where:

Will we be able to give the children smelly stickers at the end of the show?

Will we be able to give the children fruit at the end of the show?

Would the children be able to make a fruit shaped shaker before they came to watch the show so that they can use it during the performance?

During the meeting I took a few notes. Here are some of the notes and outcomes from the meeting:

·     Set date for the performance – Thursday 25^th January 2018 at around 1:45pm.

·     There are currently 89 pupils in year 1 so this would be the audience for the performance as our performance studio has a capacity of 90.

·     Children will be able to make the fruit shaped shakers prior to the show.

·     Children love GoNoodle (where the children copy a dance routine) – potential for an easy dance routine in the performance.

·     Smelly stickers and fruit can be given to the children at the end of the show. Also, children quite like raisins so this could be something that we could also give to the children.

·     There is a healthy eating coordinator who works for the council. Need to find out contact details.

·     Teeth are a problem with the children in year 1.

·     Saturday – sweetie day (eat all the sweets that you like on sweetie day and then no other sweets for the rest of the week).

·     Performance fits in with many different areas of the curriculum – maths, English, art, PE, D&T, music and science.

Here is a picture of me and Sarah at the meeting this morning:

I found this meeting really useful as we were able to chat to Sarah face to face and share different ideas for the performance. We were able to share our ideas with Sarah but also Sarah was able to share any ideas that she had for the performance. It also gave us an opportunity to ask any questions that we had so now we can go away and start to put the piece together.

It is great that we already had this contact with Sarah from last year because we worked with her during the community project unit of this course. This meant that we already had a connection and it therefore made it easier for us to find a school who was willing to let us perform to their pupils.