First Practice

Ohhh man, my brain is very mushy right now. We had our first Christmas program practice at church this afternoon.  Everyone was over there, in their places by 1:30pm.  There are lots of logistical issues to work out with this program... It's called "The Road to Christmas" and there are two people who are following the road to Christmas, seeing signs along the road, talking to people they meet on it.  We're also having instrumentalists accompany two of our first songs, so we need an extra place for those people to stand together (but not cover anyone up).  Last night, we underestimated how much room they'd need.  They were squished today and did not hesitate to let me know!  Their playing went well, but we need to figure out a different arrangement.  I think we'll split the choir and have the tone chimes on one side and the instruments on the other.

I did not assign instrument parts very well.  The 8th grader with the most parts is playing instruments for the two songs accompanying our choir.  So she has to do a lot of back and forth running around.  Today we did a lot of "who goes where when?" and "which side of the stage do I need to be on?"  I also pulled some of the 3rd and 4th grade angels to do some special acting with Mary and Joseph (when the angels come tell them the news).  But I made the mistake of just picking kids, not drawing a name out of a hat, and one of the third graders was not too pleased.  So I told them I would draw names out of a hat for the permanent roll on Monday, and the ones today would just be the ones doing it for today.  Sigh. Drama, drama, drama.

Mostly what our issues today come down to is that we need a few more microphones and just a little more space up front.  I should probably go through the program in my head, seeing where people should be and when.  Today was rough, but a surprising number of kids showed up where they were supposed to, when they were supposed to, without me having to say anything to them!  We were supposed to be off book today.  My kiddos had their parts memorized this morning as part of their memory work.  Some of them still had it memorized during practice.  A few forgot their lines and remembered when prompted.  A few totally blanked.  So Mrs. E and I stressed that everyone should look over their parts over the weekend, even if it's already memorized.  Only five more practices until our first performance! Yikes!

I found a new "English" game for my kids to play during Work on Writing.  It's called "Mad Libs: The Game" and it's basically Apples to Apples mixed with Mad Libs.  One card is in the middle with a sentence on it that has blanks where the nouns/adj/verbs are.  For example, "If you can't be (verb), be (verb)."  Players have seven cards in their hands to pick from, and they place their selections face down on the table.  They take turns reading the sentence with their card selections substituted for the spaces on the main card.  Afterward, people vote on which one is the best.  My kids had a blast! We played in pods, dividing the cards up amongst the three groups.  They came up with some pretty silly sentences!  The best one from the morning was, "If you can't be handcuffed, be explosive!"