Thursday, April 26, 2018

Play and STEAM

We've had a rush, rush, rush day... or at least it's felt like that to me. Maybe the word I'm looking for is 'steady.' We've had to work steadily all day to accomplish all the tasks we needed to.

This morning, I did oral FAST testing with 9 out of 11 students. I still had to meet with my normal Thursday people, so it felt like we crammed a lot into the three rounds we did. Also, our piano schedule was more tightly packed this morning since we went to the MLC play this afternoon.

We left right at 12:20 so we'd get there in time for the 1pm show. I had a student getting picked up at 12:30 for an appointment and worried about what to do with her during the 10 minutes between when we left and when she got picked up. We couldn't just leave her by herself at school alone! Thankfully, my recess helper agreed to hang around until the student's mom picked her up. Whew!

The play was decent, Cinderella and the Substitute Fairy Godmother. It starts at fairy godmother headquarters where the boss is pre-celebrating the company's success with the upcoming Cinderella job. After she marries the prince, everyone will want a fairy godmother and they'll be wildly popular! But at their pre-event celebration, all the fairies eat potato salad that's been sitting in the sun too long and... they get food poisoning. Cue the substitute fairy godmother. Except, it's actually a fairy godfather whose passion in life is selling scented candles (scents like toe fungus and hog barn). His last mission ended up turning Pinocchio into a yak instead of a real boy. But there's no one else!

Meanwhile, Cinderella's family ordered 100 llamas so they can make cheese and sell the fur and make lots of money! And Cinderella has to stay home from the ball to build the barn, dig the new outhouse, and wait for the llamas to come. Her godmother sub arrives and doesn't do his magic right, summoning the three pigs instead of footmen and the big bad wolf wearing an ugly dress instead of dressing Cinderella in a beautiful ballgown. (My favorite character was one of the pigs: the one dressed like a gangster. The others were dressed as a cowboy and an English gentleman.)

The substitute godmother gives Cinderella money to hail a cab and she makes him fork over his smelly moccasins since he can't make glass slippers. But! Things turn out in the end. She goes to the ball in the ugly dress, smelling like cows, wearing the moccasins, riding in a taxi. She dances with the prince, leaves at midnight, and arrives home to find all the animals still there. Then the stepfamily shows up.

It ends where the prince followed her home by talking to the cabbie, he asks her to marry him, the fairy godfather tries to transport everyone back, but it doesn't work, so they have a dance party while they wait. Kind of an abrupt ending and it felt like there were many loose ends.

There have been better plays, but man, they really outdid themselves on the hallway decorations! I wish we could've lingered in the hallway a bit more to really look at them.

We barely got back in time for the buses. After school we set up for STEAM night. It was a roaring success, but man, I'm beat! My table had two stations: which shape paper column holds the most books? triangle, circle, square; and build a flotation device to hold an action figure's head above water for at least one minute.

The flotation device activity was SUPER popular. It makes sense; who wouldn't want to play with water? We made a big mess, but just this afternoon a helper dropped off towels for us to use, and we used them all! Most everything is put away now, or it's at least out of the gym; I have materials spread out on tables in my room that I'll put away tomorrow. Or have some of my students do it. ;)

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