Jungle In the Jungle

This week, we had our first rehearsal for the SJBS’s first (annual?) spring musical, “The Jungle Book”.  I already know that this 90 minute production  put on by twenty 4^th-6^th grade kids whose second language is English will be the most challenging massive beast that I have brought upon myself to date. I am fearful. And also incredibly pumped. But not quite as pumped as the kids. Okay, maybe as pumped.

I have been working with these kids once a week on Tuesday afternoons teaching them physical work, voice work, concentration, listening, and storytelling. And of course, we play games, lots of games. As a little trial run, I taught them a little choreographed number to “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” from the Lion King and they drank it like KoolAid (see the clip below for some cuteness).

There are so many questions I have in taking this on. Will I be able to put up a full production meeting with elementary schools for an hour and a half per week? I don’t think I could do that with a group of my friends. Are all of my kids going to drop out before we get to May? And also how will I be able to fund this? It is going to be low budget, but I do have to pay for the scripts that I  had copied, fabric to make masks and  some minimal costumes and materials to build a few set pieces.

Some parents mobilized already on the fundraising front… in Honduran fashion. They made choco-bananos to sell at school, which pissed off Grace, the lunchlady, because she can’t sell sweets. Two moms made 80 choco-bananos  and sold them at lunch. I was really grateful and it got me really excited about fundraising. Until they tallied up the money. In selling choco-bananos, we made the equivalent of $5.75 for the drama club. The moms told me that bananas are really expensive right now. But the truth is that fundraisers cannot function here in the same way that they do in the states. In the states, in a fundraiser, people pay more than they would pay normally pay for something because it is, well, a fundraiser. Children at our school really can’t pay more than 35 cents for a chocobanano, though.

Which brings me to my next point. If you would like to donate any sort of funds toward the SJBS production of the Jungle Book, let me know.  A little goes so far here. If I could raise $150 even, to get materials, we could do so much. Just think, if you donate $6, you would double what we have fundraised making and selling 80 chocobananos. Okay, I’m done. I promise I won’t pressure anymore. It is going to be a special thing regardless of funds. We might perform it on the grass in our school uniforms and it will be one of the most special event to these kids and parents to date.

I leave you with our little preview (click on the link) and a few pics from drama club! Stay tuned.

Nice mirror.

Brushing hair.

My Love is Complex, Mister.

"Confusion" by Margarita Isidora 

During integrado class (the integrated art class that I teach with the middle schoolers), we are now in the visual art quarter. This has proven to be the most challenging quarter for me to plan (the other two being drama and music). I don't know a whole lot about art. It might have helped if I had taken an art class at some point in my life.  I have been managing ok with the class.  I think I have them fooled into believing that I actually know something about art, when the truth is that everything I know has been learned from watching youtube clips over the past 3 weeks. 

We started doing continuous line portraits. Many of them sucked (because the kids didn’t take the project seriously or didn’t follow the rules to continuous line drawing, not because they don’t have talent). Some of them ended up really coming out great though. In continuous line drawing, the artist cannot lift the hand from the page from start to finish in the drawing.  It is a great exercise for the brain and causes an interesting abstraction of a portrait when you have to figure out how to get frm the eye to the ear without adding lines that will make your picture look like crap.

This past week we started color theory. We made some  nice color wheels, talked about primary, secondary, tertiary  and complementary colors. We also talked about the emotions that we associate with color and the ways in which we can use color in our paintings to our advantage. We looked at pictures from Picasso’s blue period and then I asked them to choose an emotion and try to paint a representation of that emotion using strictly warm or strictly cool colors.

 When I was circulating around the room, I noticed that one of my students was crying. I went over and checked out her painting and it was of raindrops falling on a dark, stormy sea. At the top was painted in black ink “sad.” I wanted to comfort her. I really wanted to give her a hug, but am always aware of my limitations as a male middle school teacher. I put my hand on her shoulder, got down to her level and told her that I really loved her painting, asked her if she was alright and if she wanted to step out to get some air. She nodded implying that she was fine and wanted to stay.  This student lives a very modest life in a very small house with her grandmother and has no parents. I have gotten the feeling that her home-life is not the best. I felt bad for her, wondering what the depth of the sadness was that she was experiencing in that moment. At the same time though, I felt filled with a feeling of happiness, with this being one of the few instances that a class lesson so clearly had actually reached and affected one of my students. I told her I was around if she decided she wanted to talk and told her that sometimes when we express ourselves through art, it can stir up some emotion and that this release is so important. Then I let her be.

I walked around the class to some other students and came across one of my sassy 8^th grade girls. She was painting a red-orange heart with green trim. I asked her what emotion she was expressing, while I already had a bit of an idea (despite the cryptic symbolism). I said that it looked great, but explained that for the assignment, I wanted them to use explore using either only warm colors or only cool colors. She rolled her eyes at me, gave a middle school girl huff, and said, “Mister, my love is incredibly complex.” I’m sure. Lots of feelings today. It must be art class.

"Calm" by Moises, 8th grade

Continuous line drawing by Keneth, 7th grade

Continuous Line Drawing by Edgar, 7th

Continuous Line drawing by Henry Salomon, 9th

Continous line drawing by Andres, 8th