Week 4

I am really impressed with the lyrics my students came up with while I was away all of last week.

After reading a few stories about Anansi myself, I have realized my students have protrayed Anansi incorrectly in their story. Something, I should have done before which I did today was have groups of students (7 groups) read 7 different stories involving Anansi. After reading the stories, the groups came up with characteristics of Anansi and provided proof from the text. We have know concluded that Anansi is not the nice and kind spider we protrayed in our story but infact he is a trickster, greedy, naughty, lazy, etc.

So, as a class we have decided to start the opera with a song that outlines these characteristics (Adam, we'll have the lyrics ready for this for next week!). However, throughout our opera, Anansi wants others to change their opinions about him and hence is trying to be kind and helpful to everyone.

The students want to change some parts of the story we have written after reading the stories today. We will work around the story not making any changes to the lyrics.

In the groups we were seperated in yesterday, my group worked on the text and changing it into a script. This was more difficult than I had thought. Even though we didn't get much written down, we had a great discussion about the characters that were involved and talked about possible settings. It was great to hear the students incorporate what we have been learning in class about physical regions of Africa, natural resources, how drums are craved, etc. into their opera.

The students were really excited and wanted to include a lot of dialogue. They had so many ideas and wanted to include them all! I am trying my best to keep it short and simple. This is such a difficult task!

In my notes I have the set design and costume prep scheduled for next week. Is this still on for next week?

Sona