Fall Classes at Glitter & Razz Making Kids Smarter; More Engaged
Gillian Laub from the New York Times
We have met and welcomed back some amazing kids this week as our Fall Afterschool Classes began. I am very pleased by the way things went this week. In our Itty Bitty Theater Workshops (for kids 3 1/2 – 5 years old), I showed kids that theater is about “doing stories.” Not reading them. Not telling them. But, DOING them as a gift to other people. So, we did a lot of, what I consider to be “Doing Games,” “Yes, Let’s” and “What Are You Doing” being 2 classic theater games we love for younger kids as they teach pantomime skills as well as group agreement and ensemble building.
It turns out that theater and dramatic play are also making these kids smarter. Did you all see the article in the New York Times last week? This article connects experience with facilitated, structured dramatic play to a young student’s ability to control their emotions, social interactions and cognitive abilities. Here’s the quote that legitimizes everything we are doing at Glitter & Razz in the world of academe…“that the key to developing self-regulation is play, and lots of it. But not just any play. The necessary ingredient is,,, ‘mature dramatic play’: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life…spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend.”
We also premiered our first ever Go Girls! Afterschool Club yesterday afternoon. It was awesome. 7 girls between the ages of 7 and 10 came together to start learning more about themselves, each other, and the magic and power of being a girl. We created “What Brings Us Joy” solo dances and collaged the outside of the journals we will be using during the 10-week session. We started to talk a little about the play we will be creating together. I explained to them that, I didn’t know what our play would be about but that it would be something “important.”
My plan is for the session to be an experience in project-based learning where the girls will create a play in response to a problem that is important to them. Our brainstorming of problems ranged from friends getting other friends in trouble to tsunamis to smoking and drug use. Next week, we will determine the focus of our examination and then we will do some research and engage people and resources in the community to actually use our girl power to help towards the solution of our problem.
See how we are helping make your kids smarter and more engaged in their communities? And you thought we just did plays.
