Keeping momentum - Amawus School - Tuesday Part 2

After a great start the groups started to break up. Sarah, Hollie, Hev, Sophie and Katy helped the children make masks of their favourite animals that they can wear for the performance tomorrow. I thought it was a really great idea - even if the children couldn't perform something completely, they could be apart of it with what they made. It reminded me of the Ham House birthday a few years ago when we allowed participants to make puppets and costumes. By working like this the participants had real investment in the work, and that's the thinking here. After a very chaotic 10 minutes as the youngest learners (around 50 of them) piled into one classroom before being escorted into two the children really enjoyed drawing and showing off their masks to each other and to their teacher. 

In the other groups the games had moved indoors and were working on some really strong images and freeze frames - exploring 'happy' and 'angry' as well as community, future self and how they can make these things happen. Natalie and Tom managed to get some good work out of a pretty rowdy group of boys - the picture above showing what makes them happy. In Jordan and Emilie's group there was a group of girls who really knew how to make an angry face and started to understand the Drama games much more quickly that yesterday.

However, the biggest difficulty today has been momentum - every time you start to build something something happens to change it. Either lunch, or choir practise, or the heat and so building the Drama work into something this afternoon has been difficult. However, the learners are all engaged and enjoying what they're doing all the time. 

The most interesting development are a few children who love to write and so this afternoon Natalie and Sarah have been working with 2 girls who like to rap and have been helping them write lyrics in English. The appreciation those girls have is vast. This morning one of them brought guava for Sarah and Nat to try and they gave reciprocal gifts - a packet of skittles and 2 chocolate eclairs. Such a small thing but the young girl was clearly overwhelmed at the generosity.