Today’s workshop was with year five students at Wellington school. Seven of us attended and got separated into two groups. Four of us paired in a group and took over one class and the other three did the same.
The subject of the lesson I attended was to build up the children’s confidence to be able to perform a rap version of a poem which they have written as part of their homework from last week.
We started by a couple of warm up games. As the theme was to perform, physically and vocally, we decided to choose the games within the same field. As a vocal warm up we did a lot of humming which surprisingly they all loved. Fruit picking was the other game we played in order to warm them up physically and mentally. We finally played a rhythm game where we formed a big circle and gave everyone a number. Once everyone remembered their numbers, we created a beat by tapping hour hands twice on our lags, following by two claps. At the same time as playing the beat the numbers were being passed on by whoever’s number that has been called last.
We then divided the 28 children into 4 groups of about 7 people each. The aim was not to force anyone to perform but to challenge them. When right at the beginning of the group work i asked who wants to perform, only one hand went up. A lot of them were very shy to perform even though the poems they had written were amazing.
I started going to them individually and rapping their own poems back to them with a clear rhythm. Once they heard they heard it from another person’s mouth, they were clwearly more confident towards their poems. I then asked them again one by one to rap their poems for me. This time they all did and I started beat boxing along as they were rapping. At the end of the session with my group I asked again who wants to perform. This time only one hand stood down.
We were now transformed to judges who have to watch everyone’s performance and name a winner. A very hard challenge as we did not want to come across harsh. Therefore we started by introducing them top the points we are looking to see within their performances. Rhythm, rhyme, confidence, facial expression, clear voice and appropriate actions were amongst the main aspects we were looking for.
Only seven people made it to the second audition and from those, three of them were called to a last audition. The voted person out of the three was chosen by all the other students.
The session was concluded by a 5 minutes feedback time where a wide range of grate feedback was given by both teacher and students.