Visit 4

Today's visit was amazing. We were thrown in at the deep end because Lucy, Martha and Amelia were absent but this actually worked in our favour. With Lucy's absence I think the boys felt less like they were in a teaching or led environment and were more comfortable sharing their ideas and feelings with everyone else. With less students in the room it also probably felt like they were being controlled less. 

Nick and I attended the session without much of a plan because Lucy was going to lead most of the session. Because of this we were forced to think off of our heads and improvise with what we would do before we went on to creating posters (this was planned roughly). 

We warmed up with a shake out followed bu splat which we played a few times and only one boy stayed out. However, by the end of the first games he could see that the other boys were having so much fun and wanted to join in the game. We then went on to play sardines which for the first time the boys seemed to enjoy completely. The boys were laughing and actually playing with purpose and excitement. This meant that they wanted to play the game repeatedly until we did of course have to stop in order to begin the creation of the posters.

I then explained to the boys that we were creating posters for our protest scene which is going to be in the final performance. However if they had begun to create raps and hadn't yet finished them then they could continue with that. 

One difficulty with this was the fact that a couple of the boys that turned up hadn't been with us since the first session and so they were behind. Therefore I had to catch them up to date. However one of these students did a lot of work and was really enthusiastic so I was glad that they showed up.

Once the task had been started I began to understand the importance of what community has been all about. They boys that we have been working with are very misunderstood by others and can often be mistaken for 'naughty children'. Being misunderstood can often man that you're ignored or not able to be taken seriously. I think the school and this project has really allowed the children to do what they love most and incorporated it in a way that allows the boys to express their opinions/view of the world.

One boy in particular hat was good at art was worried that he wasn't going to finish his last poster and mentioned that we should have stared them prior. This made me wish that we had. In the future if I do a project like this I will make sure that I start any creative things with them in the second session. If we manage to finish it before he project is over then that would be fine however you can't gain back time that's already passed. However, I understand that in the case of Beackmead school because we have spent so little time with the boys, it has been really difficult to gain an understanding of them and therefore decide what we wanted to do with them during the final performance.

We finished this session by sharing 4 different raps/spoken word pieces and by displaying the 5 posters which were created. It was obvious that everyone was really proud of what they'd created and the boys were excited for their performance. I hope they have the same enthusiasm when the day arrives.