Out of Class Activity - Drama (pre-drama)

At the end of the fourth week, (the last week before the raya break) we were informed by one of the History teachers that she was told by the Principal that the three practicum teachers (a.k.a 'us'), will be in charge of the historical drama for the closing ceremony for Merdeka on the 30th August.

This was very surprising as Moon and I did go and see the principal and said we'd like to get the kids involved in an English drama sometime before the end of our practicum, but we SPECIFICALLY mentioned that we don't want to do the Merdeka one because we wanted to do something fun and more English related...but, oh well. We got the job, so we have no choice but to do it.

So the history teacher left us to handle the whole thing by giving us a history reference book. She told us to choose one historical character from the book and make a script out of it. Then, get some kids who're not involved in the exams to perform it.

Now, how exactly do you write a script? Where do we find these kids? How exactly do you direct a drama? And how do you expect these kids to listen to us when they hardly even know us! (seriously, some of the kids still say, "Assalamualaikum, Kak" when they see us). Left in the dark, lost and confused. Nothing new there.

We turned to our mentors. Luckily, Moon's mentor has a class where the majority of them are in the drama club (4E). And she said, maybe we can go and ask those kids to be in the drama. We did. And the kids agreed to be involved, on one condition - only the Drama Club members are allowed to join.

"Problem solved!" we thought.

The Drama Club did Alice in Wonderland once. And they had their own director, etc for it. We thought that it would be best for the kids to choose their own historical figure (the one they feel the most comfortable to act out) and they can try and come up with their own lines. I had experience with entering public speaking competitions back in sec school, and I wrote my own text. Having to think of the words myself made them easier to memorize, so I thought it would be best if these kids do the same. And they agreed.

But, they were all busy with Actvity Week during the entire week! Everytime we bump into them we will ask them, "have you chosen the character?" , "when can we have a meeting with all of the members?" , "did you do the meeting without us?" etc etc. And the answers we got were always so vague...so in the end, we went into the holidays without having the chance to meet up with the team. But Moon took the leader's phone number so she could contact her for updates during the break...