Itty Bitty Arts Camp | Onceuponatime & Ever After | Day 3
As we know, at the heart of every good story is a good conflict. What is hard for many of us to understand is that conflicts, in and of themselves, are not bad things. They are a natural part of life. It’s how many of us handle conflicts where we can make the choice to make things better or worse.
This is what we are attempting to teach 4-6 year olds in the next 2 days. Wish us luck.
Today, we introduced the concept and definition of a conflict in the context of a story – when one person wants something and another person wants something else and these get in the way of each other. As I explained, “Raise your hand if you ever wanted ice cream for dinner and your mom wanted you to eat vegetables. This is a conflict.”
We then got into small groups and talked about examples of conflicts:
- “Playing too rough on the couch with my brother” -Eli
- “Stealing toys from another person” -Reed
- “Me and my brother fight over my marbles” -Ruby
- “When we graduated my teacher told one of the boys to get off the stage because he was being too naughty.” -Alyssa
We encouraged the kids to notice conflic’ts all day. Most importantly, we asked the kids, “Do all conflicts have to end in a fight?” We heard a resounding “NO” and then I gave them their directive…”Your job as Glitter & Razz kids is to always figure out how to solve conflicts without fights.” And we practiced all day. Especially on the playground. We look forward to getting into more peaceful conflict resolution tomorrow.
Do you really want to know what we do in camp? Well, let me show you. This first video is a clip from our morning Move & Groove class?
Take a look at the warm-up that actors do at the beginning of the drama class.
And finally, here’s a taste of the Magic Messes class. This one is a bit long (about 6 minutes) but it’s worth it to watch all the way until the end. Especially if you are Heather (Jasper’s mom).
