Group Presentation

Today was the start of our group presentations in Stephen's class.  Two groups went; arts and crafts and then my group which had the topic of drama and dance.  The first group did an awesome job!  The had four stations set up that all had to do with activities that would be appropriate for people with visual impairments.  The four stations were:  shaving cream art, drum making, making a necklace with lifesavers and fruitloops and then tissue paper art.  Each station was creative to the different types of senses that were focused on.  The shaving cream art was my favorite of all the stations; who knew that shaving cream could be so entertaining?!  We used visual impairment goggles and blindfolds to give us the illusion of being blind and then tried out a few drawing exercises.  Smell and touch were the two big senses that were being focused on at this station but the others focused on taste and hearing.  This presentation really gave me a different perspective of people with visual impairments and will definitely help me when working with this population in the future!  I tried to really put myself in a blind person's shoes while participating.

For our presentation we had three main activities that focused on the population of at risk youth.  We focused all on drama because we had done dance previously in the other section.  The first activity was called "Battle in the Woods" and was an innovative version of rock, paper scissors, involving more body movements and dramatic reactions.  The second activity was called "Identity Crisis" where a bucket of hats, masks, and glasses were passed around and the participants took one; the purpose was to create a story with all the different identities and see where it went.  People had a BLAST with this activity, people were crying they were laughing so hard!  Participants really got into their "identities" doing accents and mannuerisms to match their prop.  The last activity was also a success!  It was called "Spectacular, Spectacular" and we split up the class into four groups and gave them a bag of props and they had to use all the items except two and had to create a three to five minute skit.  The groups came up with really creative ideas given the props they had, which were literally the most random items we could all find around our houses.  Overall I feel that we addressed all our goals in our activities which were for the participants to appropriately express themselves through drama in a social environment.  We split up the facilitating between all the activities.  I shared the facilitation of Spectacular, Spectacular with Hannah, and I tried to improve my skills.  I tend to get nervous in front a group of my peers but since we are all comfortable with each other I thought it went really well.

Overall, I felt that we all learned valuable things that we can carry into our career and learned things about ourselves along the way having a good time! I'm looking forward to the last group presentations!