The Rah-Rah file by Charlotte Tervit (Vice Principal HOG Drama Academy Pretoria (Pty) Ltd)

Many moons ago when I worked as a PA in the corporate world, my boss, the MD of an insurance company, used to keep a Rah-Rah file. Simply put, it was a brag file, a thing of pride, stuffed full of articles and information about our company’s achievements and accomplishments. Every now and again, he would take out the file, dust it off and page through it with pride.

This week’s post is dedicated to all the amazing Helen O’Grady drama teachers. As we come to the end of a truly unexpected, interesting, challenging and surprisingly fun term, I think we should all file this term and our mind-blowing achievements in our collective Rah-Rah file. In future, when we have a rough week, or just feel nostalgic, we can take it out, dust it off, page through it, and look around the room and say “Wow, we really did this! Well done me and well done all my amazing colleagues.”

There have been very few times in my life that I’ve been prouder to be part of an organisation as I am to be part of Helen O’Grady Drama Academy. And to be part of the greater fraternity of teachers everywhere, who worked so hard to bring education into the homes of our children during these unprecedented times, whilst navigating their own personal lockdown journey with their families at home.

So hats off to all you phenomenal ladies and gentlemen! Rah-Rah!

- Charlotte Tervit

Student Feedback:

The Grade 1-3 Reddam students Charlotte teaches on Zoom were asked to send feedback to her...here are some of their comments:

"I love everyone thing in drama but my truly favourite thing is you!"

"I really really really like the cruise ship one and I also like the one where we got to dress up as a bird it was really really fun, I love drama!" - HN

"I like drama a lot. I like doing the guessing game we played today. I also enjoy intro activities and the Octopus activity it was fun. Thank you Teacher 👌😘"- PT

"Thanks Charlotte that was fun 😂"- TB

"I really liked the drama exercise today teacher Charlotte because my mom and I acted it out" - HN

Parent Feedback:

"Ahhh thanks ... and thank you to you guys as well for making it such a fun lesson"  

"Thank you very much. My daughter is really enjoying every minute of class. The birdie mask, blanket, the matching colours... everything, she did on her own  Thank you for being an awesome teacher too!"

"Thank you Juliet! Super fun for A!" - NB

"Class was awesome, Juliet!" - JP

"Thank you, the session was brilliant!" - SZ

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

Much needed Comic Relief

We are now approaching our 6^th week in Lockdown and the fatigue is starting to show. Parents are taking strain as they try to juggle work, home schooling and entertaining children during their off time, not to mention cooking and cleaning.

It is now more than ever we need to keep our Drama classes entertaining, fun and engaging for much needed Comic Relief. Many children are under immense pressure from school and their Parents who are, justifiably, concerned about their academic progress, as well as the inescapable boredom and cabin fever setting in. They also just miss their friends and the social interaction at school – children are (for the most part) social creatures who are at their happiest surrounded by their peers.

This is where we step in – Drama is, in its simplest form, a form of escapism where students get to interact with their Drama friends and to just have fun, laugh and be silly – especially during lockdown!  It is also a creative outlet where they can take a breath away from the books, as it were. And honestly speaking the kids just love the lessons! We even have some lessons continuing on the Public Holidays because the students couldn’t bear not doing Drama for a whole week!

So, we just need to keep on bringing our A-game to each lesson. This is when our Parents are going to appreciate us the most and the children become lifelong devotees and so cement the future of Helen O’Grady Drama Academy whether online or face to face.

                                          

The Show must go onLINE!

What an exciting few week this has been. Our online lessons have been running virtually flawlessly (see what I did there? 😉) and we are all getting into the rhythm of this new reality we are living. Our students have had an absolute ball doing online drama classes, those who were not able to join our live Zoom lessons have sent us videos of themselves following our online content posted on various platforms. It is quite amazing how good humans are at adapting to new circumstances!

And I have to say our students have been just amazing! They just took to this “new normal” like ducks to water. They are happy to go online to do their schoolwork, extra-mural activities and to see their friends. For the first time ever, they are not getting into trouble for the amount of “screen-time” they are having, and parents are encouraging them to go online! And surprisingly what I have witnessed at home and heard from friends is that children are choosing to spend time away from their screens playing outside, getting fresh air and exercise. Before this we couldn’t pry them away from their cell phones and iPads!

Of course, we can’t wait for children to go back to school and back to doing face to face Drama classes, but until then, we will harness the full power of the online world and enjoy every minute of it!

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times

The title of this weeks’ blog is a bit of a play on the opening line of Charles Dickens’ novel, Tale of Two Cities. I changed it around a bit as I think this is really a tough time for all of us, maybe even the worst we have ever lived through. There is a lot of fear and uncertainty about our way of life and when things will go back to “normal” (whatever that may turn out to be).But the strange thing is that in some respects it has also become the best of times!

The best time for creativity and innovation - thinking outside the box - to keep the wheels turning and to keep people connected, be it for work or to connect with friends and family. And it is no different for us at Helen O’Grady Drama Academy here in Pretoria and all over South Africa, and in fact all around the world. We are having online staff meetings, making videos, meeting our students in chat rooms and creating online content.

To be honest it has been a load of fun to figure out the best way to connect, making and sending silly videos out to our Helen O’Grady family to keep the spirits up, and how we can transform our live lessons into live streaming lessons. Drama is perfect to go on-screen – it’s dynamic and exciting and gets the creative juices flowing. It forces the kids off the couch, to move their bodies, jump, dance and laugh, whether they are watching pre-recorded content or during a live streaming lesson.

Not only can we do our conventional lessons in video format, but teaching our students on-camera performance techniques, how to film themselves using camera techniques like the best angles, lighting and camera shots, and how to use the latest technology to record and edit video clips are just an awesome by-products of our new line of attack. Even teaching them a universal skill like using online chat platforms like Zoom or Google Chat which they will be using in all walks of life in the future, from social interaction, to conference calling with colleagues and running online businesses.

It has also been really great for all the principals and teachers to discover new technology and forcing us to look at what we do in a new light and all the exciting possibilities that exist in the way we deliver and offer our Helen O’Grady lessons in the future. Online lessons could very well become part of the options we have available for students, especially students in areas where we do not currently have studios or opportunities for students from across the globe to connect with each other and collaborate in special projects.

Who knows?! …At the moment it feels like the possibilities are endless. And if this horrible, scary virus didn’t grip our planet in an icy grip of fear and uncertainty, we would never have explored these ideas and come up with all these awesome innovations to overcome an obstacle we never saw coming.  In closing we would like to give a shout out to everyone who follows our blog - during this time of lockdown and self–isolation….stay safe, stay healthy, stay focused and stay strong!