Pre-K Play: "A Beautiful Nightmare"

This is the title the Pre-K kids have selected for their play, which they've been working on since January. We went through an elaborate process of nominating ideas, then voting on them. In years past, classes have generally elected to entitle their production by combining all of the nominations in one long string, in a bid to make everyone happy. This year's class chose A Beautiful Nightmare, Sarah's suggestion. We wound up using a process of elimination voting style, in which the nominations with zero votes were  tossed out as we continued to vote for the ones that received at least one vote in the prior round. It was interesting to watch opinions and allegiances shift as we went through this process of out-in-the-open voting. After watching this, I'm not entirely sure I'm still a fan of the secret ballot.

This group made an artistic decision rather than a social one. I'm really quite blown away by that. When left to their own devices, I've found that if you eliminate the possibility of might making right, children tend to make group decisions by trying to please everyone. For instance, when the topic is what color to paint something, it usually winds up being "rainbow." This decision was not like that. They listened to each other plead their cases. One by one the children quit voting for just their own ideas and decided, in the interest of all of us, to chose the second best idea. Favorites were argued for and once we were down to the finalists I believe the children made a provocative artistic decision instead of a cop-out feel good one. Yes!

This Pre-K class has kept me on my heels all year with their hive-mindedness. At one point nearly the entire cast of the play were Lilac Fairies, the boys included. Who's ever heard of that? Seriously. As a teacher-coach I can't help but feel quite proud of my team this season.

I haven't posted a play update for some time (previous posts in order of appearance are here, here, here, here, and here). This is where we stand with 4 rehearsals to go.

A Beautiful Nightmare

A merry-go-round with horses on it.

Assistant Director Sarah, who did not want to be in the play will 

walk up on stage and spin this altered sit-n-spin.

Then we need some buildings, garages, house, and some vehicles, like a car.

This will be our back drop. Sarah's mom Lisa outlined the buildings after

the kids made the ill-advised decision to paint blue buildings against a

blue sky. Group painting is a very challenging thing. I'm proud of the 

children for this artwork that we worked on over the course of 3 weeks.

A Black Kitty (Anjali) waddles in. 

A real Unicorn Pegasus. (Annabelle)

A Pink & Purple Striped Superhero. (Ella)

A Pink & Purple Superhero Josephine.

Then a Car (Marcus), a Forklift (Thomas), and the Tooth Fairy (Jack) come up.

Then the Bunny (Luna) comes.

Then the Pink & Purple Superhero Katherine comes.

Then the Train (Finn P.) comes and all the Superheros, the Tooth Fairy, the Car, The Bunny, The Black Kitty, and the Forklift go on the Train and they all go around the audience.

Then all the characters scare away Maleficent.

We've glue gunned this onto a bicycle helmet which Sarah, in 

her role as assistant director, will wear. We have made arms

for Maleficent from PVC pipe, scarves, and ski gloves. To

make things clear, this is not a costume, it's a puppet being

operated by our assistant director who did not want to be in

the play.

All the characters come and put fairy dust on the audience to wake them up. (Gold glitter.)

Then all the characters except the Unicorn Pegasus and the Bunny get in a battle. The Bunny stops the battle with magic.

And then the characters come and sprinkle fairy dust (more gold glitter) onto the White Pegasus. Then the Unicorn Pegasus flies away. Then all the other characters go around the audience.

Then the really, really big rainbow nutcracker comes.

This photo really doesn't do it justice,

and we haven't worked on the face,

hands and feet yet, but it's taking 

shape according to our plan.

Then so the nutcracker grows to its own size. Then the characters come and play with their toy nutcrackers.

This are not very theatrical, but the kids love them. The bad 

part is that they each want their own while on stage, which 

means the audience will have to wait until they each 

fish their own nutcracker from a basket. Oh well.

Then the nutcracker and all the characters except the Bunny and the Unicorn Pegasus get in a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big battle. And then a small robot puts a large bathtub on a battle. (We still don't have a bathtub. Thomas believes that his family has the perfect box at home.)

This robot, I believe, is a preschool masterpiece

We used one of our scooters as a base, selected the FedEx

box for a body, and the strange object for the head. We

took apart a large fan for the propeller. It's pretty sweet. Sarah,

who is assistant director because she didn't want to be in the

play, will wheel this out.

There is a fire . . .

This is orange, yellow and red tissue paper taped to a fan, but I'm hoping

to scrounge up some cellophane instead. The kids are not satisfied with this.

. . . and all the characters put it out.

Everyone goes in the pool.

This is our failed first attempt at making a giant rainbow nutcracker. We are now 

using it as our pool.

Then the ice age comes and the Unicorn Pegasus timbers down a whole bunch of ice (large foam blocks) and everyone waddles away as fast as they can. 

The Train should only move. The Train goes very fast and breaks down the tracks. He has a accident!

Everybody fell into everybody and they punch each other. Then they punched the blue tree.

I suggested that we paint the trunk blue, but

that idea was rejected out of hand: "Trunks

aren't blue Teacher Tom, just leaves."

Then they punched a rocket.

Inspired by our recent pendulum play, I think, we're

going to try to hang this from the ceiling and take

turns punching it. Luna did most of the work on this

and has tested out its punch-ability.

Then everyone dives into the big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool, pool.

The Unicorn Pegasus ice skates.

Everyone slips and slides.

Everyone goes into a beautiful castle with pretty walls painted pink.

We settled on a very pale pink indeed.

And then everyone dives into a pool.

We're getting a lot of milage out of our failure!

Then Maleficent puts everyone to sleep. Shhhhhh!

And then Maleficent changes from bad to good

This is going to be a challenging "costume change" because assistant

director Sarah, who did not want to be in the play, is going to be

wearing this "puppet" as well.

Maleficent wakes everyone up.

Then everyone flies on top of the Train. Then they land right next to the Train. And they ride the Train. While they are on the Train, they are watching TV on him. (The kids follow Finn around the audience, all of them using their own imaginary remotes!)

It's night time and there is stars . . .

We made these by wrapping small squares of tissue paper

around the ends of pencils, dipping them in glue and

carefully sticking them on tag board stars. Right now the

plan is to each hold up our own stars using the craft stick 

handles, but I'm going to suggest we hang them on string 

from a broom handle and let a parent dangle them overhead 

from "backstage."

And the moon.

We've decided that we're all just going to point at the moon that Julian's

mom painted on our gym wall many years ago.

Everyone stays up in the night. There's gonna be Maleficent. She'll just close her eyes and bonk her head.

THE END