Year-end Productions 2020

We have reached the end of the year! We ended term 4 with a two week long marathon of Year-end Productions. As with everything this year, we had to rework and adjust to fit in with Covid protocols, but come what may, we were going to end with a banger of a Show for each studio.

 In some cases, this meant a Show at a venue, drastically scaled down to only accommodate the students and parents of one particular studio at a time, similar to how we would do our mid-year Drama Presentations. Even though it was not as grand and elaborate as our usual Year-end Productions, and looked quite different with all the Covid 19 protocols like masks, shields, and social distancing, it certainly was wonderful to do a live performance with a live audience to appreciate the hard work the students did this term. It was also great to be able to hand out certificates and trophies! 

 For our remaining online students, we hosted our first virtual Year-end Productions, which was also very exciting! We worked for several weeks recording our plays, scene by scene and editing it all together. The whole process was so different from what we usually do, but it was lots of fun and the students really enjoyed being in their own movie. At the virtual show, we had a viewing of the movie and presented the students with certificates and trophies! After a long, interesting, and often challenging year, it was wonderful to end it on such a positive and exciting note. Celebrating what we do best: performing with our friends, in which ever shape or form, and having a great time!

Check out our Facebook page for lots more photos!

Helen O'Grady Pretoria

“SUPPER THEATRE” a roaring success at the Theatre Domicile

We ended off our third term with a Bang! All our Upper Primary students, and a selection of Lower Primary students hosted a re-imagined version of our Parent Presentations. Normally our students do a group Parent Presentation, where they get to show off what they learnt during the term. This term we had to put a bit of the twist on it and it was in the form of a Supper Theatre performance in their own homes.

                                         

All students had to plan and perform a show, which included a 3-course meal, as well as a variety of items performed while the audience enjoy their various courses. They designed posters, tickets, menus, and programmes. They had to create a stage, set with props and costumes. They had to be the MC and the waiter, or enlist their siblings to help. 

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The Upper Primary students had to perform a solo interpretation of a traditional Verbal Dynamics item, Cities, as well as a Monologue, and an improvised advertisement. The Lower Primary Students who chose to do the Supper Theatre, performed a dramatized prose, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, by Michael Rosen, and a poem from our Term 3 selection. 

We encouraged the students to be creative and put their personal stamp on the event, so some students wrote their own monologues and added items to their performance, changed the “supper” to a “picnic”, and helped prepare the food and used it for their advertisements.

We asked the students to take lots of photos and videos so we could all share in the fun, and from what we received, it was a roaring success all round. The parents clearly enjoyed the performances and the food, and the students loved showing off their work. When asked for feedback after their performance, the one word used to describe their show most often was “amazing”. Time and time again: “It was AMAZING!” 

How wonderful that we could bring enjoyment, fun and excitement to our students’ homes and families. 

 

This year has been so challenging for everyone, but it has pushed us in so many ways to re-invent and re-imagine old favourites, and each time the result was so, well, amazing!  

Let’s keep this momentum and level of enthusiasm going into Term 4, where we are once again going to have to pull a rabbit out of the hat to make our year end productions live up to our tried, tested and much adored live shows.

Another Day, Another Plot Twist!

One of my favourite sayings at the moment is:

If something doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, just yell “plot twist” and continue to Sparkle! 

The one thing that is certain at the moment is that everything is uncertain. We plan and plot and just when we think we've got a handle on things, understand the game, someone yells “Plot twist” and the rules change and it's back to square one. And so the plot thickens.

One such area is the reopening of schools and the rules and regulations around it. It is causing much frustration for parents, but sadly also confusion and even anxiety for our kids. While venting about this and processing my own frustration, it dawned on me that once again we have a wonderful teaching opportunity here. We can teach our kids to roll with the punches.

Pre COVID 19 our lives, and importantly our children’s lives, were for the most part very structured (some lives more so than others) but nonetheless, it followed a very clear and certain path. All of a sudden it is all up in the air and things seem to change on a daily basis.

Perhaps we can teach them the life lesson that things do change and that things don't always work out the way we planned. But we as humans can adapt, embrace the challenges and try to make the best of it - the whole life and lemon thing comes to mind....

But even if there is not a jug of refreshing lemonade at the end of the tunnel, we can still roll with the punches, work through the tough times and make it to the other side. Pretending that going back to school under the new circumstances will be fun is possibly setting the children up for disappointment, but they will get through it and they will get used to it. Or if they are not going back to school at all, explaining that they won't be with their friends every day might seem like punishment, but they might end up looking at the world in a whole new way.

Our drama classes can be a great example of how change is not always a bad thing. We have been able to bring high quality and fun drama lessons to all our kids making use of various digital platforms. But we can go back to face to face classes at any time and have awesome classes, or even do a hybrid of the two. We do not need to view the change from the one to the other as bad, just as a new chapter.

We, the teachers and students of Helen O’Grady Drama Academy, can adapt, change and embrace this new reality. As I’ve mentioned before, drama is so fluid and, well, creative that we can make great performance art out of almost anything and any situation we find ourselves in. Social Distancing? No problem, we just inflate our drama bubbles a bit and exploit a good opportunity to work on projection. Protective gear? Bring it on, we love dressing up – hazmat suits are the new black! 

Our classes are incredible, our content is pliable and we are even adapting our year-end productions to, not just a sad watered down version of what it used to be, but an exciting, thrilling new challenge that the children will love. (Watch this space for more on that!)

The important thing is that we SHALL keep going and we SHALL be there for our drama students and we will come out of this in the end with bells on! 

So just yell “plot twist” and continue to sparkle!

Drama Dress Up Day

This term we introduced Virtual Drama Dress Up Days - the children have loved it! One of our favourites was when we all dressed up as birds, learning to fly for the first time.

Dressing up is a great way to get children to transform into their characters and make the activity come to life. 

By using objects they had at home, and clothes from their (and mom's) cupboards, and with a dash of creativity we had the most colourful and exciting birds in town! 

The lockdown has presented us with a surprising bonus. In some schools or studios, it is just not practical for children to take part in our dress-up lessons. With everyone one being at home, this is a brilliant way to add another level of excitement and creativity to the lesson. They can use props, and even select a setting or “stage” where they can do the activity, like in the garden for the birds or the kitchen for the chef.

TEN weeks is an extraordinarily long time to be confined to your house and unable to go anywhere fun and exciting. Giving children the opportunity to transform their house and garden into a forest or restaurant or desert island or haunted house is a great way to give them some ideas of how to start playing pretend more often and give them a break from their electronic devices to use their imaginations freely.

Electronic devices used to be their fun time, their “escape” whether to watch animated movies and programs or to play video games, and there is one thing these things all have in common – the children don’t have to use their imaginations much, the graphics and animation are so amazing these worlds seem real.

What a lucky happenstance it is then that we have a beautiful moment to teach our children how to step away from these devices, which is now a learning tool (and not only for fun as much) and reignite their own ability to create worlds and stories beyond anything they have ever been spoon-fed by popular culture. Let’s help them, through dress up and imaginative play to try new feelings, come up with fantastical ideas and let their imaginations soar!

Friend or foe, that is the question:

January 2020:
"Johnny, please go play outside, you've been on your iPad all day!"April 2020:
"Johnny, please stop playing outside, you haven't been on your iPad all day!"
Who would have thought a mere few months ago that our iPads, mobile phones and laptops would become our most valuable partners in education!

Long gone are the days (well, actually not so long!) that we obsess about too much screen time and worrying that our children’s brains will turn to mush from looking at their mobile devices for more and an hour a day!

It's true that in many countries, like in North America and in Western Europe many education systems have successfully integrated technology and multimedia as part of their basic education platforms, but nothing like it is now and most certainly not in most of South Africa.

It is actually phenomenal how we have been able to embrace technology as a teaching tool, and especially the mobile device, and how we have started using it, neigh, depending on it to bring all sorts of educational material and programs to our youth, as is the case with Helen O'Grady Drama Academy. We made an almost seamlessly smooth transition from face-to-face classes to delivering our classes on multiple platforms, from pre-recorded lessons on Facebook, to live Zoom lessons right in our students’ own homes. To be honest, there was a lot of frantic paddling beneath the surface for the first few weeks, but for all the world to see, it was swan-like and graceful 😊

And it has been a roaring success! Drama has just been one of those subjects or activities that works brilliantly on a screen. The children enjoy it, they participate with gusto and are incredibly creative under these conditions. Perhaps we should not be surprised - children have known for years how much fun it can be to stare at a screen and now we are capitalising on it.

But it does beg the question though, what happens when this is all over? When life can go back to a more familiar routine of leaving the house, going to work and attending classes again face-to-face? Do we abandon all we have created and established during this dark time in our history and pretend it was just a bad dream, or do we continue with a hybrid system of face-to-face classes and an online offering to those who might not be able to attend classes in person? All our hard work and lessons learnt for the greater expansion and footprint of our amazing Academy?

I guess only time will tell, but it would be interesting to watch. I, for one, am very excited about what our future holds. 

Here are a few testimonials from Happy Parents:

Mrs Dinath: You doing an awesome job with them 😘 Thursday is the highlight of the week!

Mrs Govender: Yes and the kids are loving it as well. This is the new way of life I guess until further notice 😊

Mrs Paruk: Thank you for introducing the kids to Zoom! Both Uzayr and Isa loved it!

Mrs Nel: Hi Juliet, G is enjoying the videos, thank you. We do one video per day. G likes me to participate with her. The length of the videos are perfect! Not too long and not too short, and they are wonderfully engaging. 

And testimonials from Teachers:

Hi Juliet! It was lovely. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m very impressed with how these kids stayed engaged. I was wondering how that would go and if they wouldn’t lose interest. You are such an amazing teacher even on screen😉 – Larisa Grove JP Drama Teacher Redhill

The kids are loving the Zoom lessons! - Tanya Gerasimo Reddam House Early Learning School, Deputy Head

If are interested in finding out more about our Online Pre-recorded and Zoom Drama classes please feel free to contact, Principal Juliet Jordaan, on 0829091630 or email juliet@helenogrady.co.za