Term 3 begins...

Well it has been quite a while since I lasted posted on here but since we had our first day back at Kids@Citz today it's time to get back to my weekly updates! It's all very exciting this term at Kids@Citz as we are now running 16 classes over a Saturday and a Sunday and I believe (Helen, please correct me if I'm wrong!) that it will be the first time that the theatre has been opened on a Sunday! And not only that, there's more... we now have 4 tutors and 5 assistants over the two days, having grown from just one of each in the first term. We also have Yvonne as the new Kids@Citz supervisor which is fab because she looks after everything in the foyer and makes sure that things are ticking over just the way they should be. So as you can see it is now quite an operation!

Now I can only give a small slice of what is going on in the classes because as I mentioned there are also 3 other tutors (who will hopefully be able to give us some updates too!) but I can tell you about the Tiny Citizens (4-5s) and Little Citizens (6-8s) on a Saturday and also three of the four Sunday Junior Citizens (9-12s) classes, so I will do my best to get as much up as possible without posting epic entries!

So, on to the classes that I was involved with today...

Both the Tiny Citizens classes looked at fairytales. We talked about what ingredients make up a fairytale like castles and knights, Kings, Queens, Princes and Princesses, magical creatures, goodies and baddies... and then we used some special magic paint and paintbrushes to paint our own castles which we explored. We looked in different rooms and used our bodies to make the shapes of different objects that we found along the way. We also pretended to be different fairytale characters. Over the rest of the term we are going to look at a different fairytale each week from the list of fairytales that the children came up with. Next week both classes will be working on Cinderella.

The Little Citizens classes were both working on the same thing today too. We discussed what makes a good story... characters, description, expression and structure. We specifically talked about how every story needed a beginning, a middle and an end. We then looked at a story by The Brothers Grimm called The Frog Prince and talked about what the beginning of the story was, what happened in the middle section and what the end part was. In groups the children then made a tableau (still image) for each of the sections of the story. We then shared these tableaux as a whole group. I think for the rest of the term these two classes will be working on different things as the 2nd group has a lot more new people in the class whilst the first group is all returners (even though some have moved up from the Tiny Citizens).

The first group discussed what they might like to do this term and after taking a vote it was decided that we will spend the term looking at different pantomimes and learn about all the different elements of pantomime such as the classic characters, some of the conventions, slapstick routines etc. and hopefully at the end of the term we will have put together a mini-pantomime of our own.

As for the second group I think for the next couple of weeks at least we will spend some time just workshopping different kinds of activities and take it a week at a time.

So it's all pretty exciting! I'll post an update tomorrow about how our first ever Sunday goes!!!