DI2018 Session 4 – T-shirt and developing story ideas

Goals for Session4 were:

1. Warm up:  Review T-shirt design
2. Discuss story ideas for Central Challenge
3. Enact one of the stories with discussion, rehearsal, and presentation

We started with listening to t-shirt ideas from each kid. There were creative ideas with a blend of tigers, monsters, and mixture. One of the creative ideas was about blending a couple of animals into a single picture. Another idea featured two animals, purportedly to represent the two cultures and the animals were playing ball together. There were simple renderings of tiger with stripes. After the initial presentation the kids have to go through the process of voting and selection. Voting and selection extra time while everyone first selected their own idea and then showed hands for many other ideas. I had to limit to one vote person (we are a controlled democracy here :)). Soon the voting converged to pick the one with two animals playing in a friendly manner. I need to work with Medina DI coordinator to ensure we can get t-shirts made from this.

For the main course each kid presented their ideas of the story for the central challenge. Each one had different selection of countries from across the world. I walked through the exercise of sports and food from each country, just so they can identify elements to include in their storylines. Some kids need more preparation to get the food and sports concepts for countries in. I am hoping that the parents guide them by asking questions and encouraging the kids to research on their own.

We picked one of the stories and let the kids loose to go discuss and prepare a presentation. The discussion was for 5 minutes, rehearsal to take up 3 minutes and the presentation to take up 3 minutes. It was a good exercise. Being 7-year olds, they wanted to use their energy playing tag and magically they included the game of tag into their presentation :). We did this discussion, rehearsal, and presentation rhythm twice. I am going to call this the DREP drill for future reference. I was impressed with the creativity they had with minimal props. As usual after each drill we had a small reflection time to identify and improve on certain elements. Lots more practice, role ownership, costumes, dialogs, etc. remain. A couple of kids need to speak up more in this group activity. Rightly enough the kids identified roles of narrator and certain characters.

For our next session we will focus on following:

• Develop storyline for central challenge
• Identify cultures to include for the challenge
• Identify roles for kids
• Identify props, artifacts, costumes, etc.