Thursday, May 7, 2015

Drama Class Creativity and Youth Reading at the Chicago Zine Fest!

Mr. Nall's Drama Class is always fun, experimental, chaotic (chaotic with energy and creative ideas- the best kind of chaos imaginable!)  The students really let their imaginations grab hold of the prompts Mr. Nall provides and go running with them! It's been really great seeing the students take leadership of certain roles in the drama games as well. 





Whether it's writing, acting, or directing in a scene- the drama students have really mastered the ability to improvise with any situation thrown at them! Students will receive a prompt that gives the who, what, and where of the scene, and then with a team of students writing out the action of the scene and a group of directors describing how the actors should use the prompt to tell the most interesting story, a story is created and a creative ensemble is born!

This week, we asked students outside of the Drama Class to write some scenarios that the Drama students would have to act out. 

The prompts were pretty simple: students would write a fairly normal sentence, but leave a noun blank, leaving the actor to decide what would go in its place. For example, the prompt would read 'It's raining ______ outside today!', Sofia and Riley would select this prompt and insert 'Watermelons' in place of the blank, and then proceed to act out their reaction to fruit falling from the sky!



More exciting news from the Drama Class! STEM's very own students will be participating in a reading this Friday called 'The Next Generation: A Youth Reading', organized through the Chicago Zine Fest! CZF is a two-day celebration of writers, artists, and self-publishers. Three STEM students will participate: 2nd grader Henry Benton, 3rd grader Alexia Wolf, and 5th grader Jacob Watson will read original poetry in front of an audience of Chicago's most talented writers! The event is on Friday, May 8th and takes place at Access Living (115 W. Chicago Ave.) from 7-8 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Come out and support our STEM kids!