A month or two ago I started a reading club at my local library in Irene. For want of a better word, I call it a reading club but what I do it every Thursday, I go to the library between 2.45 and 3.30 and whatever children are there are invited to come a play a few games and then we read a story.
It hasn't been the most consistent occurrence - I started two weeks before the April hols. Then over hols I was away one of the weeks and then there were a million public holidays. So the librarians and I decided to start again in May.
I recognised most of the kids who came this last Thursday. They came previously and seemed to enjoy it. But you can never tell with children, unless they come again and again and this is what these children did. Most of them are from the Irene Middle School, a poorer school in the area.
I took a lot of what I know about workshops from watching workshops that Tristan gave to school children at the National Arts Fest, and again at his old school. The theme was game playing as a way to drop barriers and to make the exchange of information easy.
To start, I get the kids to stretch and to feel the specific muscles lengthening. Then on the first few times I got the children to play Columbian Hypnosis. This is played with two people: one is the hypnotists and other the one being hypnotised. The hypnotiser holds their hand a few centimetres away from the face of the other. And then they move their hand, up down, round, over, under, as they want and the other has to follow. Then they swap. This is kind of what it looks like:
The children were at first unsure and even now I have to tap some of them on the shoulder to remind them that they must move their feet. Sometimes I direct the hypnotists and tell them where to take their partner.
The best game I have played thus far is pass the parcel. The parcel is any goodie I have, this last time a bangle. And with music wafting out of my cell phone we pass the bangle around and the person who has it when the music starts has to start the story and the next time the music stops they gave to elaborate it. The story we made last Thursday was about a chicken who ate a cow because they were fighting. The cow to get revenge made the chicken sick and he vomited up the cow (not digested yet!) but because it was quite a feet the chicken passed out (dead I think).
Wow as I write this I see it is a very dark story. But in some points I had to use my imagination. One of the youngest littel boys can speak very little English so between the older children they decided that if he should get the bangle the boy next to him would quickly translate into Sepedi and then translate back into English the little one's part of the story. But he was having none of it - in his very little English he gave his part of the story. Then the other children and I would grant ourselves creative licence to make it a bit more structured.
My favourite part thought was when, after pass the parcel, I mentioned off hand that I had gone to dance class that morning and was feeling a bit stiff, as I got up off the ground. SO after a quick conference between three of the girls they asked me (maybe more told me) to show them the dancing that I do. So right there, outside the library (praying that I was not disturbing the ballet classes going on in the hall right next to the library) I put on Kwela Kwela and I taught all of them (even the boys were breaking our their dusty dance shoes) how to do some zumba moves, some latin american dance moves, some afr0-fusion and even some hip hop swaggers. And they loved it and I LOVED it.
They were also starting to expect the games that we played. AT one point I get them to walk and behave like their favourite animal. The first time they all dropped down to all fours. Then I made them all name their favourite animal and then embody that energy. This time round they were ready. Where before I had to coax it out of them, on Thursday I was met with Lion! Giraffe! Baboon! Frog! Leopard! Bee! And off they went, embodying and impersonating their favourite animal. And I never looked at it this way until the librarian pointed it out. I was doing this because it challenged the creative minds of the children, to see how best to move their bodies to be the animal. The librarian said it was also teaching them
about the animal, not just in a classroom, in a book, but actually
being the animal.
Before I get too theoretical about embodiment (this is what I wrote a 50 page thesis on), I will love and leave you. I will put some pics of said reading club up soon. x
Amanda told a short story about a bird in a field hunting for a snail and the snail is running away (snail, with shell, you get the drift) (see bird, loose object one flower stem away is the snail - or the memory of where it was because about half way along the page is the actual snail, zooming away)
Here we have a cat, who is looking for a bowl of thick, warm milk and mistakes the shell at the bottom of the river for such a treat.
A young boy decides to go fishing at river and catch himself some nice ol' fish. Except he appears to have forgotten his rod and so stands perplexed at the side :)
