Back To School!

This fall started with an exciting project with three of the public schools in Cuneo and the school in San Rocco participating! This year I’m working with 1st year middle school students, instead of the 3rd year students, I had worked with last year. We decided to continue with my workshop “American Indian Stories and Studies” but lowering the language skill a level or so to make it easier for intermediate students to understand and enjoy. That meant a bit of simplification. I took the original American Indian story, “How The Beaver Got His Flat Tail.” and with the help of my very educated, fun, charming, and intelligent English teacher friend, Dani, (yes, she is very dear to me!) morphed the original story into the present tense while using very short sentences. Ever tried to tell a story in the present? It’s not easy as a traditional story generally happens in the past and this one in particular happens “long ago, when there were more animals than men…” So, “Once upon a time there was a beaver who loved to brag about his tail..” becomes instead “A beaver walks through the woods. He likes to brag about his tail” The downside of all these changes was that the story instantly became shorter. I quickly created another character to build the story back up a bit, a really cute bear climbing a tree, (he was a big hit,) and some more trees. But the unexpected upside of adapting this story was I found I had to really rely on my puppets. There was more movement, exaggeration, and action involved this time, more movement around the room and interaction with the students. I also used them to convey emotional ideas. Needless to say it was a blast, and I learned a lot. 1st years are quite different from 3rd and I had to find new ways to make them laugh, (different things are funny to 1st years,) while telling the adjusted version of the story. The best part of course is watching the students retell the story using the puppets! I managed to shoot a bit of film of each classes performances and will be posting that shortly.

Look at these smiling faces, they are so cute!