Theatre Word of the Week: Mime

This week's theatre word of the week is MIME. The students in my 6th grade class filled out KWL charts on mime before I told them the definition and showed them examples, and here is what I found out they knew/wanted to know.

WHAT I KNOW:

• act without talking
• stay silent
• can act out anything
• street performance
• add sound effects
• stay focused
• big imagination
• paint faces
• wear black

WHAT I WANT TO KNOW:

• Can you talk in mime?
• Who first came up with miming?
• What's the purpose?
• How do you stay serious?
• How do they make it look so real?
• Why are they silent?

Then we watched some examples of mime, including this clip from Marcel Marceau:

After the video clips were watched we came up with this definition as a class:

mime-to silently act using elaborate facial expressions and body movements

Then we filled out our charts to show what we have learned so far:

WHAT I LEARNED:

• It is an old art form
• It is important to have many facial expressions
• Not all mimes wear make-up
• Sometimes mimes use props

Stop by our classroom next week for some examples of mime from our very own 6th graders!

See you then!

Reading Word(s) of the Week: Iambic Pentameter

I have decided to come up with two words per week to go over with my blog readers: one for my reading classes and one for my theatre classes. This week's reading word(s) are iambic pentameter.

As we begin our Shakespeare unit, I thought it would be best to start from the very beginning with "iambic pentameter." As the students walked into the classroom, I had the words written on the overhead. I asked them to break the word "pentameter" down. They knew that "penta" meant five and that "meter" was a unit of measurement. I asked them what would a "meter" be in a poem, and they told me a line or stanza. We therefore automatically knew that iambic pentameter had something to do with the number five and a line. Broken down, this is what they came up with:

After we mapped out the meaning, we looked at the definition of the word on wikipedia.

"Iambic pentameter (from Greek: ἰαμβικός πεντάμετρος meaning to have five iambs) is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is used (in English, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word "pentameter" indicates that a line has five of these "feet.""

To practice finding iambic pentameter in play format, we looked at the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and mapped out the "heartbeat" on the paper like this:

I am so proud of my 6th and 7th grade Reading students for doing so well on this assignment! Here they are hard at work:

Next up....SONNETS!

Audition Announcement

Auditions

for

Cinderella Waltz

by Don Nigro

Monday, January 23, 2012-

Thursday, January 26, 2012

4:00 in the RMS Auditorium

Please come by Mrs. Markham's room (Room 15) for an audition packet and more information!

See you there!

Project Runway

In our seventh and eighth grade theatre arts classes, we have been very busy "making it work" over the past six weeks! We modeled a lesson off of the Lifetime television hit TV show, Project Runway. The students had to design an outfit for a boy and for a girl, vote on their five favorite designs, and in groups, create those outfits using non-traditional materials! (And by non-traditional, we are talking TRASH!) They brought in supplies and spent a full week molding, sewing, taping, and gluing their outfits together until we came up with 5 outfits per class. The classes then voted for their favorite out of those top five. It was fun and they learned a lot about costume design!

Here are some examples of their designs:

(Click the picture to increase in size)
(The pictures were taken with my phone, so they are not the best quality of photo.)

4TH PERIOD DESIGNS:

7TH PERIOD DESIGNS:










(My apologies to my students if I left your design off of the picture collages. I believe some may be missing, but I had no intentions of purposely doing that. Love you all!)

4TH PERIOD RUNNERS-UP:

7TH PERIOD RUNNERS-UP:


THE MODELS:
4TH PERIOD:

7TH PERIOD:

WINNING DESIGNS:

Congrautlations to Salma (period four), for her winning design, and her group for putting together a beautiful, pink, plastic table cloth dress which caught the judges' eyes!


Congratulations to Amanda (period seven), for her winning design, and her group for putting together a fabulous, feather-riffic cat outfit which caught the judges' eyes!

Congratulations to all of the 7th and 8th grade theatre students for your hard work and participation in this project! I see some future designers amongst us all!

In the words of Tim Gunn: "Make it Work!"

Semester Exam Schedule

This week, as I'm sure you all know, is semester exams. Here is the schedule for the rest of the week:

WEDNESDAY:

8:40-9:25 am -- Period Five

9:29-10:14 am -- Period Six

10:18-11:04 -- Period Seven

11:08-12:33 pm --Period Eight (Follow teacher's lunch schedule)

12:37-2:11 pm -- Period 3 Exam

2:15-3:50 pm -- Period 4 Exam

THURSDAY:

8:40-10:40 am -- Period Five Exam

10:44-12:40 -- Period Six Exam

FRIDAY:

8:40-10:40 am -- Period Seven Exam

10:44-12:40 am -- Period Eight Exam

There will be no school on January 16, 2012 in observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!